Tony Petrilli on Abstracting Complexity in Cross-Border Investing

In Episode 42 of The Exponential Show, host Mayank Singh sits down with Anthony “Tony” Petrilli, Chairman and CEO of ViewTrade, for a conversation on fintech, investment access, wealth technology, market infrastructure, and the future of cross-border financial services.

Tony brings decades of experience across finance, brokerage, infrastructure, and wealth technology. Through his work at ViewTrade, he has been involved in building technology and market access solutions that support financial institutions, investors, and ecosystem partners around the world.

This episode was shot at True Digital Park, Thailand’s most comprehensive landing spot for international businesses and individuals.

A Career Shaped by Finance and Technology

Tony’s journey into finance began early.

As a young person, he would accompany his father to brokerage offices and watch the market unfold in real time. In those days, investing looked very different. There were no mobile apps, no instant dashboards, and no online access. Investors often had to visit a broker’s office, call someone directly, or wait for the next day’s newspaper to see stock prices.

For Tony, that experience sparked a lifelong fascination with financial markets.

What drew him in was the way markets reflected the world in real time. Economic shifts, political events, business performance, and investor sentiment all showed up in the movement of prices. That combination of information, timing, and decision-making became the foundation of his career.

But as Tony explains in the conversation, the evolution of finance has really been a technology journey.

The personal computer changed how people accessed information. The internet changed how information was distributed. Mobile technology changed how investors interacted with markets. And today, new technologies such as AI, tokenization, and stablecoins are shaping the next phase of financial infrastructure.

How Investment Access Has Changed

A major theme of the conversation is access.

Tony has seen the industry move from a world where investors had to depend almost entirely on brokers for information, to a world where individual investors can access global markets from a phone.

But that simplicity on the front end hides enormous complexity behind the scenes.

When an investor opens an app and buys a foreign stock, it may look effortless. In reality, cross-border investing involves different regulations, banking systems, tax requirements, languages, data formats, market structures, and settlement processes.

Tony compares this to sending a rocket into space. From the outside, it may look like a clean launch. Behind the scenes, there are countless systems, processes, and points of coordination that have to work together.

That is where ViewTrade operates.

The company focuses on abstracting away the complexity of cross-border investing so that financial institutions can offer global market access to their customers in a more efficient and cost-effective way.

ViewTrade’s Role in Cross-Border Financial Infrastructure

ViewTrade’s work is not just about providing access to foreign markets. It is about building the infrastructure that allows local financial institutions to serve their customers better.

Tony explains that many firms can operate within their home market, but cross-border investing is a very different challenge. A broker, wealth platform, or advisor that wants to offer access to another market suddenly has to deal with a new layer of operational and regulatory complexity.

ViewTrade’s role is to help solve that problem.

Rather than competing with local financial institutions, Tony describes ViewTrade as a solution provider that works with local brokers, advisors, regulators, banks, and service providers to make cross-border access more efficient.

That distinction matters.

In some cases, global platforms encourage investors to open accounts outside their home country. Tony’s view is different. He believes investors are often better served when their relationship remains with a trusted local institution, while ViewTrade powers the infrastructure that allows that institution to offer global access.

In his words, the goal is to help the local financial services industry grow, not take business away from it.

Why Regulation Should Be Treated as a Standard, Not an Obstacle

The conversation also explores regulation and how ViewTrade approaches different markets.

For Tony, regulation is not just about reading the rulebook. It is about understanding the spirit of the rules.

That means focusing on investor protection, anti-money laundering standards, proper account opening, correct counterparties, and responsible market access. Even when a market’s rules are not fully developed, ViewTrade does not treat that as an opportunity to exploit gaps.

Instead, the company looks at the strictest regulatory standards it has encountered globally and tries to bring those best practices into each market.

That approach has helped ViewTrade build trust with regulators. Rather than entering markets as an arbitrage player, Tony says the company tries to act as an enhancer of regulation by sharing global experience, helping shape best practices, and supporting more sustainable market infrastructure.

It is a long-term way of operating.

And that long-term mindset shows up repeatedly in Tony’s answers.

The Role of AI in Financial Services

AI is another major topic in the episode.

Tony sees AI as a multidimensional force in financial services. Its impact is not limited to one area. It can improve operations, accelerate account opening, assist developers, support compliance, help analyze trading patterns, write and review contracts, and give investors faster access to relevant information.

One of the biggest opportunities he sees is in information discovery.

In the past, investors were limited by what they already knew or had time to research. Today, AI can help an investor quickly explore companies, sectors, or markets they may not have previously understood.

Tony calls this “investment tourism.”

An investor can explore what is happening in Switzerland, Germany, India, or any other market and quickly receive a useful summary of opportunities, trends, and context. This does not remove the need for judgment, but it can dramatically shorten the path from curiosity to understanding.

At the same time, Tony is clear about the limits of AI.

In ViewTrade’s approach, AI can recommend, organize, analyze, and assist. But the human still owns the decision. Whether it is a compliance officer approving an account, a developer reviewing code, or an investor making a trade, responsibility cannot be outsourced entirely to a system.

AI can help the human make a better decision, but it should not replace accountability.

Asia’s Role in the Future of Investing

Tony sees Asia Pacific as one of the most important regions for cross-border investing.

He points to the rapid growth of non-US ownership of US securities and the increasing appetite among Asian investors for global access. Younger investors in the region are more globally aware, more comfortable with technology, and more interested in growing wealth through international exposure.

Thailand is an important part of that story.

ViewTrade saw an opportunity in Thailand because local financial institutions were facing real challenges in offering cross-border access efficiently. Rather than viewing that complexity as a reason to stay away, Tony saw it as exactly the kind of problem ViewTrade was built to solve.

The company has invested time and resources into understanding the Thai market, working with stakeholders, and building local relationships.

For Tony, entering a market means becoming part of the financial services community there. That includes hiring locally, building local partnerships, understanding local needs, and helping the ecosystem succeed.

Long-Term Relationships Over Transactions

One of the most memorable ideas from the conversation is Tony’s emphasis on long-term relationships.

Early in his career, while working around some of the major figures of Wall Street, Tony received a piece of advice that stayed with him: be long-term greedy.

The meaning was simple.

A transaction may pay once, but a strong relationship can create value for decades.

That philosophy has shaped how Tony thinks about clients, regulators, partners, and markets. ViewTrade’s approach is not built around extracting short-term value from transactions. It is built around creating infrastructure that helps multiple stakeholders win over time.

This perspective applies beyond finance.

For founders, leaders, and business owners, Tony’s message is a reminder that sustainable businesses are not built only on deals. They are built on trust, reliability, and relationships that compound over time.

What’s Next for ViewTrade and Cross-Border Financial Services

Looking ahead, Tony sees several areas that will shape the next phase of financial services.

The first is the continued expansion of asset types. Investors are no longer limited to traditional public market products. Prediction markets, tokenized securities, stablecoins, and new forms of digital assets are all changing how people think about access, liquidity, and opportunity.

Prediction markets are especially interesting to Tony because they allow people to express views on a wide range of outcomes, not only traditional financial assets. Instead of simply buying a stock and betting on price direction, people may be able to participate in markets based on whether certain events happen or do not happen.

The second major area is tokenization and stablecoins.

Tony sees these technologies as potentially important because they can reduce friction between the movement of securities and the movement of money. Today, those often run on different rails. Securities move through brokerage and market infrastructure, while money moves through banking infrastructure. Tokenization may allow those processes to become more integrated over time.

The third area is continued innovation itself.

After decades in the industry, Tony’s approach is not to panic when new technologies appear. It is to engage with them, understand demand, and find the path toward useful solutions.

His advice is simple: be persistent, do not panic, and do not study forever without doing.

Innovation is not something to be watched from a distance. It has to be engaged with directly.

A Practical View of the Future of Investing

The conversation with Tony Petrilli offers a grounded look at what it takes to build infrastructure in one of the most complex parts of financial services.

Cross-border investing may look simple to the end customer, but behind every seamless experience is a web of regulation, technology, compliance, banking, market access, and trust.

ViewTrade’s work sits inside that complexity.

And Tony’s philosophy is clear: make the hard things easier, keep the end customer in mind, support local financial institutions, and build relationships that last longer than any single transaction.