Borderless Investing Runs On Infrastructure Many Investors Never See
Tony Petrilli, Chairman and CEO, ViewTrade.
For years, the financial industry treated democratizing investing as a product challenge. Build a better app. Simplify onboarding. Make trading faster and more accessible. Those things helped. But they were never the hardest part.
The real challenge starts the moment an investor presses “buy.”
That is where markets, currencies, settlement systems, custody frameworks and local regulations all begin interacting with one another. Much of that infrastructure was originally designed for domestic investing—not for a world where retail investors can move capital globally with a few taps on a phone.
This is the gap that defines financial services right now: Demand has globalized faster than the infrastructure beneath it.
‘Investment tourism’ is now the norm.
Demand moved first. A generation ago, international investing was largely reserved for institutions and wealthy individuals. Accessing overseas markets required multiple brokers, banking relationships and operational work that most retail investors would never see.
That world is gone. “Retail investors poured an average of $1.3 billion into the market each day during the first half of 2025,” near record levels, according to Vanda Research. Someone sitting in Bangkok or Dubai now follows industries, companies and market trends as closely as an investor in New York.
I describe this shift as “investment tourism”: the idea that people may earn locally but increasingly want to participate in growth stories wherever innovation, opportunity or wealth creation is happening. I’ve noticed this change is especially visible across Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, where more people are investing—and looking beyond their own borders to diversify and build long-term wealth.
But demand is only the first rung. Knowing about an opportunity is not the same as being able to act on it reliably, and the place that gap shows up first is in the product layer investors touch every day.
The operational reality behind a simple trade is complex.
Demand only becomes participation when investors can actually act on it—and fractional shares are what made that possible at a global scale. Many of the marquee names that international investors want to own trade at hundreds of dollars a share; fractional investing is what turns “I want a piece of that” into an executed trade for someone allocating modest sums from another currency. Many people still view it as a consumer convenience—investors can now buy smaller portions of expensive stocks. What gets overlooked is the operational complexity it creates behind the scenes.
Dividends, corporate actions, tax reporting and reconciliation all become more complicated when positions are held fractionally across multiple currencies and markets. AI-enabled platforms and fractional offerings are genuinely giving retail investors institutional-grade access—but that same shift introduces new tax-reporting challenges for broker-dealers and clearinghouses, especially around cost-basis tracking, wash sales and real-time transaction data. As firms expand globally, those complexities multiply quickly.
This is where many companies underestimate what cross-border investing actually requires. It is relatively straightforward to launch a front-end investing platform. It is much harder to build systems that operate reliably across different regulatory environments, settlement cycles and market structures over time.
I have seen firms approach expansion backward—chasing distribution and user growth first, then discovering their infrastructure was designed for a single market and cannot scale across borders. Those problems only become visible once trading volumes grow or investor activity becomes more global. By then, the cost of fixing them is far higher than the cost of building for them from the start.
If fractional shares showed the strain at the product layer, the next sign of catch-up is bigger: The market itself is now reconfiguring. The demand for global, continuous access is no longer just behavioral—it is becoming structural. “As of January 2025, extended hours trading accounted for over 11% of all US equity trading, with over 1.7bn shares traded daily during these times”—more than double its share in 2019. Much of that growth has been concentrated in the early pre-market hours, driven by round-the-clock demand from international investors.
AI could change the infrastructure layer more than the front end.
Each rung so far has been about catching up to demand that already exists. The last one is about where the next phase of that catch-up happens. The conversation around AI in investing tends to focus on research, personalization and recommendations. The bigger long-term impact, though, is likely to fall on the infrastructure layer itself.
As financial systems become more automated and the investable universe widens, the frameworks supporting them will need to become more resilient, auditable and interoperable across markets. When discovery becomes cheaper and attention spreads beyond a handful of heavily traded names, the operational systems behind execution, custody and settlement have to perform across all of those expanded positions—not just the liquid ones. That is a heavier load than the front end ever sees, and it is where reliability is won or lost.
Financial infrastructure evolves slowly for a reason. Trust and operational consistency matter in capital markets in ways they do not in consumer technology. But the direction of travel is clear: Investing is becoming less tied to geography and more tied to access.
The firms that win could be the ones you don’t see.
The same pattern runs through all of them—demand racing ahead, infrastructure steadily closing the distance. The firms that succeed in this environment may not be the ones with the loudest features or the most polished applications. They may be the ones capable of reducing complexity behind the scenes and making global participation feel seamless for investors who now expect nothing less.
Borderless investing is not simply about opening access to new markets. It is about building systems capable of supporting a far more connected investing world—one where the infrastructure makes global participation possible.
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