St. Pete digital brokerage embraces AI, the Rays and US markets optimism

The fintech company Webull Financial moved to St. Petersburg in 2022 as part of an influx of firms coming to the city and region following the pandemic.

The digital brokerage’s Group President and U.S. CEO Anthony Denier say the firm began looking to move out of New York City in 2021, exploring several cities as possible landing spots. It settled here, buying a building in the city’s Carillon office park.

Like many of the companies that made the move, he cites Florida's business climate, lifestyle and the proximity to Tampa International Airport for choosing the area.

Denier, 48, still lives in the metro New York area but the company now employs 276 people in St. Pete and continues to grow.

Webull — founded as a brokerage business in 2018, went public last year and had $571 million in revenue in 2025 — is also making its imprint on the city and the market beyond adding to the tax base and workforce.

If you have to ask how, chances are you haven’t watched a Tampa Bay Rays game in the past couple of years.

Webull became a major corporate sponsor of the team last season and has its name stamped across Tropicana Field, and, more noticeably, on patches on the players’ jerseys.

Neither the company nor the team will disclose how much Webull pays for all that notoriety, but aside from the in-stadium branding and jersey patches the deal includes suites for games, fan events and exposure on social media and TV. And it pays for the distinction of being the team’s “official online brokerage.”

Denier spoke to the Business Observer on Aug. 31 at Tropicana Field; he threw the ceremonial first pitch as part of Webull Day. He spoke about the company's future, AI and more. Edited excerpts: 

What is the value of making the investment to sponsor a Major League Baseball team?

The selfish reason is that it brings eyes to our brand, and if the Rays can increase their impressions that is, overall, positive for our partnership.

We sponsored an NBA team (the Brooklyn Nets) prior to sponsoring the Rays, so we have a little muscle memory when it comes to what values we're looking for. With the Rays in particular, it coincided with us building our headquarters. We wanted to make sure we were a part of the community.

That was very, very important to the employees that we're trying to bring down from other parts of the country, especially New York. Companies are trying to recruit here. We want (employees) to see that we are here to stay, and we are embedded in the community.

You moved the company to St. Petersburg in 2022 — how was the transition from New York?

The biggest adjustment is a little different kind of work culture. But I think overall the number one challenge we face in the St. Pete-Tampa area is specialization in the financial industry.

It’s a very specialized world when you go into banking. A lot of those things are just standard in a city like New York, where you have a huge depth of talent when it gets very specialized; that's where we found difficulties.

That's becoming less apparent as more and more financial companies move down here.

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How has running a public company changed how you lead day-to-day and deal with the additional scrutiny?

Now I have multiple jobs. I've always had multiple things that I had to do, media being one of them. But now that we're publicly facing, it’s a lot of investor time. I spend a lot of time with investors talking about the story, talking about the next three to five years of our business, where we're going, and it does take a lot of time.

There was always scrutiny, but when you're dealing with long-term private equity and venture capital investors, they're not looking at it from a quarterly perspective. They're saying, “Where are you going to be at the end of the year?” Now that we're public, every quarter you have to show growth. You have to show performance, regardless of what the markets do.

How is Webull incorporating AI?

Where are we not incorporating AI should be the question.

It's been hugely important for internal efficiency. It's been hugely important for our external viewpoint. 

In our opinion, I don't want to get too industry specific for this conversation, but AI is going to redefine the way that someone interacts with their brokerage account. If you think back to the 1980s, you had to make a phone call. Then in the mid 1990s, you could log in for the first time. In the teens, you were actually trading on your smartphone with a platform or something similar.

The next generation is all going to be natural language. People are not going to be clicking buttons, or hitting prompts, or tapping their phone anymore. It's all going to be natural language, intuitive.

What about guardrails given the concerns about the technology?

It's customer initiated, that's number one. Everything has to be customer initiated. In the future, that will change. But today, AI is there as an assistant. It's there to help you to speed up.

I'll use a quick example. If I wanted to pull up a three-month Apple chart on my Webull app, and I wanted to put in some moving averages, and maybe a broad S&P index overlay, I could do that very easily because I've been using Webull since we started. I know all the locations of all the different analytics, and I can probably do that in 30 seconds. For a new user, it would probably take them 15 minutes to figure out to do all those things.

The next generation that we're going to really embrace is going to be just hitting the microphone button on the app and saying, “Show me a three-month chart of Apple, overlay 30-day, 50-day, 200-day moving averages, and put on top the performance of the S&P index.” And instantaneously, you're looking at that chart. No more clicking of buttons. No more figuring out where's the drop down for that.

It’s a learning curve, but our business only does well when our clients do well. We never take the other side of a client's trade, never. That is not our business model. We are there to facilitate access to capital markets on behalf of our clients. And our business grows and only gets better and bigger as our clients’ accounts grow and get better and bigger.

How could that AI adoption affect your workforce?

I haven't seen any reduction of headcount. I mean, I don't foresee any reduction of headcount because of AI.

That's not saying there won't be in the future, but we are a growing company. We’re growing at almost 100% every year, so we are still aggressive in hiring, even with utilization of AI.

When you look at at the economy, at the world, what are you optimistic about it? What do you worry about?

I'm really optimistic on the embracing of technology. We like the AI trade. People say, “Oh, you know we're at a top. Or, you know it's a bubble getting ready to burst.” I mean, it's fully embraced from the government level to the investor level to the people actually building these products. That is one of the key reasons why we see, out of our 16 operating broker dealers we have around the world, almost 90%, across the board, of their capital flows are going into the U.S. markets because the U.S. is the leader in these technologies.

I continue to be very optimistic about that. That is something that is not only good for our country, it's good for the market. It's good for investors to be involved in these emerging technologies.

What I am worried about is the trend that we're seeing in deglobalization over the last six or seven years. It's the opposite of what investors are doing. 

As the world deglobalizes, retail investors, whether they're here in the U.S. or they're abroad, they are looking at the world. Politics is doing the opposite of that.

That's what I'm a little fearful of. As we start to kind of go back to our hermit kingdom status, that never goes well over time.