Appia Financial Services
A collection of expertise
09 June 2026
John Stracquadanio, CEO of Appia Financial Services, sits down with Hansa Tote to discuss the aims of the business, target clientele, and initial product offerings in a world that is becoming increasingly technologically minded
Image: John Stracquadanio
Appia Financial Services is a newly formed broker-dealer, providing the securities finance ecosystem with specialised solutions. The firm operates as a focused, institutionally-aligned intermediary, designed to support clients and counterparties through deep capital markets expertise. John Stracquadanio, CEO of the firm, dives into what Appia’s team can offer clients, and how they are embracing changes in technology and alternative solutions to create speed to market.
Why Appia, why now?
Appia comes after my career in banking. I moved into the venture capital space a few years ago and I got a bird’s eye view into all this incredible transformation with technology and AI that affected the entire world. Something that particularly piqued my interest was the opportunity to help organisations within the securities finance ecosystem navigate challenges they may be facing. Additionally, what has been really interesting to me is watching some of the decisions that participants, and the securities finance markets, are facing in terms of how they are transforming their own technology stacks, how they might be changing their businesses with respect to what is changing in the entire industry, and how to try to combine the new technology that is available to them.
In my opinion, Appia and its collection of experts will be able to help numerous customers across the entire spectrum face some of those challenges and capitalise on new business opportunities.
Tell me a little about the experience of the team you have assembled?
We have a partnership that includes expertise across many different categories in financial services and investment banking. We have people that have been deeply in securities lending, both from an agency and principal perspective, prime brokerage, operations, and compliance.
What makes Appia unique is that we started with a group of people that have all finished their careers in banking, prime brokerage, and hedge funds, and working for large complex firms. We feel that Appia has an enormous amount of accumulated experience.
The team has collective experience in the many different scenarios that our potential clients might be facing, and this is where, from a consultative perspective, we will be able to assist them in navigating through some of their challenges while introducing them to businesses that will enhance their offerings.
What products are Appia expected to initially offer?
We created Appia to look at three main areas.
The first was capital placement and execution. Capital — the ability to introduce pools of capital, whether from an investment perspective or a financing perspective. We first looked at capital placement scenarios in which we have a wide breadth of knowledge and relationships across the board. We can help seekers of capital, both from a leverage perspective and an investment perspective, make a match with potential investors.
The second area — again, based on our collection of experience — is the introducing prime brokerage piece. What we bring to the table in this area is a number of possibilities and alternatives that clients in the prime space might not necessarily see because they are buried in the middle of the pack of very large organisations.
This aspect is tailored specifically for the smaller to mid-sized hedge funds, identifying some innovations in the technology that is being created, bringing it to a sector of clients that typically does not really see those types of offerings, could be really interesting for us. This is where we can make positive contributions to either show alternatives in the securities lending space for small funds or understand more about how to get more out of their prime brokers. We are an independent company, and here to help all sides of the ecosystem.
Third and finally, we focus on fully paid and securities lending. This is an area of expertise many of our team share. What we feel is incredibly interesting in this space is specifically the emergence and the journey from where wealth management is entering into the securities lending space in force. This is where we feel that there is much opportunity helping wealth managers understand how they could further monetise their client’s assets and share on that monetisation.
Bringing some larger institutional expertise into that space could be really interesting, especially for clients that might have an accumulation of client assets but have not necessarily employed or designed the operational capabilities to create a programme for themselves.
We feel we are uniquely positioned to coach and help consult organisations to bring that product forward and enjoy some of the benefits for their clients and for themselves.
Who are your target clients? Are they a niche in the market or a cover broad based arena?
We want to service all players, both on the buy and sell side. We would like to be trusted consultants and experts with an added element of independence, where we are working with each client’s uniqueness and being able to identify what changes are required. Depending on whatever the opportunity is, we would like to introduce ideas and expertise to help them either focus or refocus on opportunities.
We do not want to limit ourselves to one particular client base. Due to the spectrum of experience we have, we think we can operate in multiple layers of businesses and markets, and with different types of client segments.
We are open to helping potential clients, both in the banking and dealer space, in the pension and buy side space, and hedge fund space. It is unlimited, and because our platform is relatively lean, it does not require us to have a particular business operating solely for Appia.
We have the opportunity to be incredibly broad and just find the best opportunities for the organisations we are working with.
The other part that we are trying to emphasise is to pay particular attention to scenarios where we are enjoying the work and enjoying the interaction. We want clients to feel that they are getting value from having executive level people helping them in what they are wanting to accomplish. There remain considerable inefficiencies in the marketplace, and we have experts that can help close gaps and identify substantial opportunities to maximise returns because we have done it before.
Do you see yourself purely competing against the establishment or rather an opportunity to perhaps partner?
We will 100 per cent look to partner with the establishment. We are here to introduce new ideas that we are seeing due to our visibility in different areas of the businesses that our team either has experience in or are looking at right now.
Our goal is to come in with an idea, or respond to an idea, and provide feedback, with the hope that those scenarios will lead to transactional opportunities for everyone. But they do not necessarily always have to lead to transactions. Our biggest strength is this collection of expertise that is partnering with everyone that we can in the ecosystem.
Technology is a big part of the industry, do you see this as an impediment to growth, or do you see alternative solutions that will allow Appia to operate better, smarter, and faster?
Technology is where we have a great deal of expertise and hopefully the biggest impact. Appia is embracing changes in technology and alternative solutions will create speed to market. The landscape changes every day, and because there are clients that are potentially in so many different areas of maturation, it could be incredibly interesting to introduce some of the new technology that is being created to solve very specific problems.
Our model could be incredibly interesting for managers of businesses that are facing technology debt issues, where they might want to understand some of the alternatives that they have in front of them or that we would be able to identify for them, and bring it forward in a way that is cost effective and does not necessarily make them lose any momentum.
The next five years of responding to this transformation in all of these areas of AI agent use, digitisation of assets and tokens are critical — and I think it would be beneficial for organisations to have a team at Appia helping them analyse some of this with some independence, as opposed to solely doing it alone.
This is where, in my opinion, we will enjoy some of the most interesting conversations over the next couple of years.
