VALR/Badi Sudhakaran Interview
This article is an adaptation of an interview originally published on DL News.
Badi brings over two decades of experience in technology and finance, with deep expertise in blockchain technology, product design, and leadership within the crypto and fintech space.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
From a product perspective, how does the idea of “revolutionising finance for humanity” influence what you build, what you prioritise, and what you choose not to pursue?
You now serve more than a million users and nearly 1,800 institutional clients. What are the biggest product tensions you face when balancing simplicity for beginners with the advanced functionality required by professional traders?
Liquid staking, margin, futures, OTC services, and Bundles are all expanding the VALR product surface. How do you keep the platform intuitive and easy to navigate while adding more advanced instruments?
Crypto Bundles were introduced as a way to make investing simple. How did you determine the methodology behind VALR10, including asset caps, monthly rebalancing, and the exclusion of stablecoins? What signals will guide the creation of future thematic bundles?
VALR recently secured an OTC Derivatives Provider licence in South Africa. How does regulated access to CFDs, options, and swaps change your roadmap for derivatives products for both retail users and institutions?
Corporate accounts include dual authorisation, shared access, and highly scalable sub accounts. Which institutional pain points were you most focused on solving when you designed VALR’s governance tools and API features?
VALR’s API has become a major access point for institutions. What unexpected or innovative integrations have emerged since deeper programmatic access became available?
Looking ahead, what do you see as the next major frontier for VALR’s product strategy? Are you focused on more regulated offerings, deeper trading tools, new investment products, or entirely new financial primitives?
INTERVIEW ANSWERS
[DL News] VALR CPO Interview
1. From a product perspective, how does the idea of "revolutionising finance for humanity" influence what you build, what you prioritise, and what you choose not to pursue?
At VALR, product decisions flow through a filter: "Does this bring us closer to financial systems that transcend borders and serve all of humanity with equal dignity?" This acts as one of our core principles for prioritization.
We strive to understand user needs in our market - whether that's someone making their first $10 investment or institutional traders executing sophisticated strategies. Take our Crypto Bundles as an example: we recognised that portfolio diversification shouldn't require a finance degree. We prioritise building products that remove barriers and solve real problems for investors at every level.
Another non-negotiable principle for us at VALR is that we never build products that exploit information asymmetries or extract value from less sophisticated users. We don't gamify trading into entertainment at the expense of financial well-being. And when we partner with others, we always ask: "Does this serve the collective good, or extract from the vulnerable to benefit the powerful?"
The principle of the oneness of humanity serves our overall product strategy. A farmer in rural South Africa deserves the same quality of financial infrastructure as a hedge fund in London. Our users become advocates not because of marketing but because they've experienced products that genuinely serve them with integrity and excellence.
2. You now serve more than a million users and nearly 1,800 institutional clients. What are the biggest product tensions you face when balancing simplicity for beginners with the advanced functionality required by professional traders?
This is perhaps the most beautiful tension in product design. Our stance is that everyone deserves access to the same underlying infrastructure, just through different interfaces matched to their needs. Our product strategy serves this purpose by way of ‘progressive disclosure’: revealing complexity gradually as users demonstrate readiness. A new user sees a clean interface focused on simple actions: buy, sell, store. As they grow, additional functionality reveals itself naturally. The professional trader can bypass all this and jump directly to advanced trading views or API access. Same infrastructure, different entry points.
The real tensions we navigate: feature complexity versus interface simplicity, onboarding friction versus compliance requirements, education versus overwhelm. Our solution is thoughtful information architecture: advanced features live in clearly separated sections that beginners naturally avoid, while professionals access them instantly.
For institutional clients, our API provides an elegant solution. They don't need to interact with our consumer interface at all. They build exactly the experience they need while accessing our liquidity and infrastructure. This lets us keep the web interface optimised for retail users while serving institutional needs programmatically.
3. Liquid staking, margin, futures, OTC services, and Bundles are all expanding the VALR product surface. How do you keep the platform intuitive and easy to navigate while adding more advanced instruments?
We organize products around mental models users already understand from traditional finance rather than crypto-native categorizations: Invest (for growing wealth), Trade (for active participation), Earn (for generating yield), Borrow (for accessing liquidity), and Move (for payments and transfers). This means users navigate by intent - "I want to earn yield" - rather than by product mechanics. The complexity exists within each category, but the navigation layer remains intuitive.
With VALR we maintain consistent design patterns across all our products - color coding, risk indicators, and order flows work identically whether you're trading spot or futures. This means when users graduate to more complex products, the interface feels familiar even though the underlying mechanics are more sophisticated.
The key discipline: as we add products, we simultaneously work to simplify existing experiences. Adding products doesn't necessarily mean adding complexity if you're simultaneously removing friction elsewhere.
4. Crypto Bundles were introduced as a way to make investing simple. How did you determine the methodology behind VALR10, including asset caps, monthly rebalancing, and the exclusion of stablecoins? What signals will guide the creation of future thematic bundles?
We studied traditional index funds - the S&P 500, diversified bond funds - and asked what made them successful for mainstream investors. The answer: they remove the burden of selection and timing while providing broad exposure. We wanted to bring that same simplicity to crypto.
Market cap as our selection criterion serves multiple purposes: its objective and verifiable, ensures liquidity for efficient rebalancing, and represents collective market wisdom about which projects have demonstrated staying power. "The 10 largest cryptocurrencies" is instantly understandable - users don't need to trust our judgment.
The 40% asset cap addresses a specific challenge: Bitcoin often represents 50-60% of total crypto market cap. Pure market-cap weighting would create a Bitcoin-concentrated portfolio, defeating the diversification purpose. The cap ensures meaningful Bitcoin exposure while guaranteeing significant allocation to other major assets.
Monthly rebalancing makes the fund responsive enough to capture major market shifts, infrequent enough to minimize transaction costs, and predictable timing that users can plan around.
We excluded stablecoins deliberately. Bundles are investment products designed for capital appreciation. Stablecoins are designed for stability. Including them would dilute the investment thesis and create a product that's neither a cash alternative nor a growth vehicle.
For future thematic bundles, we're watching several signals: user growth, coherent investment narratives (DeFi, Layer 1s, AI crypto), sufficient liquidity within categories, and most importantly, clear user demand evidenced by manual portfolio construction patterns. We won't create bundles just because we can - only when they serve genuine user needs with methodologies we can defend intellectually and operationally.
5. VALR recently secured an OTC Derivatives Provider (ODP) licence in South Africa. How does regulated access to CFDs, options, and swaps change your roadmap for derivatives products for both retail users and institutions?
This licence is pivotal not just for VALR but for the entire African crypto ecosystem. South Africa has created one of the world's most comprehensive crypto regulatory frameworks, and this places us in rare company globally. We're building derivatives products within a clear legal framework that protects users and creates institutional confidence.
VALR already offers perpetual futures trading, which has proven valuable for both retail and institutional clients. Retail traders use them for leveraged exposure and hedging their spot positions, while institutions leverage them for strategies like basis trading and portfolio risk management. The perpetual futures market provides the liquidity and price discovery that benefits the entire ecosystem.
The ODP licence now equips us to expand beyond perpetuals into a multitude of structured products. We're in the early stages of planning these offerings, but one example we're particularly excited about is covered options. In simple terms, covered options allow users to generate income from crypto they already hold - you earn premiums while maintaining your position, creating yield opportunities beyond just holding or staking.
These new instruments will complement our existing products, creating opportunities for income generation, risk management, and portfolio optimisation that weren't previously available in regulated form in Africa. For retail users, this means more ways to manage their crypto holdings. For institutions, this removes barriers to offering comprehensive crypto services within clear regulatory frameworks.
We're approaching this methodically, building progressive access with intuitive interfaces that make these instruments accessible without compromising on user protection.
6. Corporate accounts include dual authorisation, shared access, and highly scalable sub accounts. Which institutional pain points were you most focused on solving when you designed VALR's governance tools and API features?
Institutional clients don't just need bigger accounts - they need fundamentally different products that solve organizational challenges. Our governance tools emerged from two sources: first, considering how we'd want these tools to work ourselves, and second, listening to how businesses actually operate in practice.
The pain points: single point of failure risk (one person controls everything), visibility without access (finance teams need to monitor without trading authority), operational complexity at scale (managing multiple portfolios in separate accounts), comprehensive audit trails for compliance, and API integration imperative (no one wants manual logins for business-critical operations).
We designed multi-layered governance: role-based access control with configurable approval workflows, IP whitelisting and geographic restrictions, and time-based controls. Our sub-account architecture lets institutions create unlimited sub-accounts with independent balances and trading histories, all manageable from a single master account. A fund can run each client in a separate sub-account while the fund manager oversees everything holistically.
Our institutional API provides feature parity - everything possible in the web interface must be possible programmatically. We offer comprehensive endpoints for account management, trading, portfolio management, reporting, and treasury operations with sub-100ms response times and 99.95%+ uptime.
These features solve specific workflows: hedge funds managing multi-strategy portfolios, corporate treasuries managing multi-entity structures, and family offices maintaining client segregation. Once institutions integrate our API into their operations, we become embedded infrastructure rather than just a service provider. That creates relationships beyond transactional exchanges and positions us as essential financial infrastructure for institutional clients.
7. VALR's API has become a major access point for institutions. What unexpected or innovative integrations have emerged since deeper programmatic access became available?
When we first built our institutional API, algorithmic trading was the obvious use case. What surprised us was the breadth of entirely different applications that emerged.
Payment processors began integrating crypto payments at point-of-sale, immediately converting to fiat via our API so merchants receive fiat while customers get crypto payment options. Hedge funds built their own custom interfaces on top of our API - not just for client-facing portals but for internal administration and operations management.
Multiple institutions now use our API to distribute crypto products into platforms that were previously entirely non-crypto. They're embedding crypto functionality into existing investment platforms, wealth management systems, and financial applications - making crypto accessible to users who would never open a dedicated exchange account.
FX providers discovered they could use our infrastructure for inward remittances using, what has now become a common term, the "stablecoin sandwich." Stablecoins are transferred into South Africa, then converted to local currency via our API for the recipient. This reduces costs significantly compared to traditional remittance rails while providing faster settlement times.
We're also seeing sophisticated arbitrage trading operations built entirely on our API: firms monitoring price differences across platforms and executing automated trades to capture inefficiencies.
Perhaps most interesting are the use cases we still don't fully understand. Some institutions integrate our API in ways that solve problems specific to their business models or markets. Each integration creates value for their customers while strengthening our ecosystem.
These unexpected integrations validated our platform approach: build robust infrastructure, expose it programmatically, and let creative developers build services we never imagined. We're providing the foundation on which others can build - that's infrastructure serving humanity by enabling innovation we couldn't build ourselves.
8. Looking ahead, what do you see as the next major frontier for VALR's product strategy? Are you focused on more regulated offerings, deeper trading tools, new investment products, or entirely new financial primitives?
The next major frontier isn't a single product category. It's the convergence of traditional finance and crypto infrastructure, enabled by regulatory clarity and driven by genuine utility. We're entering a phase where crypto stops being a separate asset class and becomes integrated financial infrastructure.
I see several primary frontiers. First, regulated digital asset banking - unified money management where users maintain a single balance view across fiat and crypto, with seamless conversions and intelligent cash management. We're building crypto-collateralized financial services where your Bitcoin unlocks lines of credit, mortgages, and business loans without selling appreciating assets.
Second, predictable yield products that offer crypto's upside with more stability. Fixed-term structured products with defined outcomes, institutional-grade yield products meeting investment mandates, and automated yield strategies like covered calls accessible to retail users through automation.
Third, and increasingly important given regulatory clarity and institutional adoption, is building tokenization and payment tools for businesses. We can't serve every end-user directly, but we can power institutions who serve their own loyal customer base. We're focused on enabling these institutions to tokenize assets and leverage crypto's efficient financial infrastructure to upgrade payment systems. Whether it's tokenizing real-world assets, enabling instant settlements, or reducing payment friction - the infrastructure we're building lets institutions bring these capabilities to their customers.
This embedded finance infrastructure approach - becoming the invisible layer powering crypto functionality for banks, fintechs, and businesses - represents a significant opportunity. Banking-as-a-service where traditional banks integrate our infrastructure, and corporate treasury services where any business can access sophisticated crypto management via API.
Our prioritization framework asks three questions: Does it serve genuine human needs? Does it advance financial inclusion? Can we build it excellently? We'd rather build fewer things excellently than many things poorly.
The unifying theme is creating financial infrastructure that transcends geographic and economic boundaries. Whether someone's managing $100 or $100 million, they deserve access to sophisticated financial tools delivered with dignity and simplicity. That's the frontier worth pursuing:a fundamentally more inclusive, accessible, and just financial system.
Risk Disclosure
Trading or investing in crypto assets is risky and may result in the loss of capital as the value may fluctuate. VALR (Pty) Ltd is a licensed financial services provider (FSP #53308).
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.
