7 things you don’t want to miss that your B2B competitors are already doing
“Offering both front end interfaces and back office support, an all in one trading solution helps to keep matters extremely simple. Taking out time consuming administrative tasks, a comprehensive trading solution allows you to focus on the task of building your brokerage” – Adinah Brown, Leverate
By Adinah Brown, Leverate
In recent months we’ve seen evolutionary changes in the financial trading industry; regulations have tightened as competition has become more prolific, which in turn has caused profit margins to be tight and conversions to be tough.
While undoubtedly many brokerages are going to feel these “growing pains” in the short term, at Leverate, we are confident that the long term outcome of these developments will see a maturing of the industry, that preserves its reputation and builds its legitimacy.
To stay afloat during this more tumultuous period, brokerages must have an operational framework that is lean and agile. In this article we present you with some best industry practices that are currently being used by top performing brokerages. While you may already be practicing some, it may be useful to check off whether you are practicing them all.
- Use of an all in one trading solution
Offering both front end interfaces and back office support, an all in one trading solution helps to keep matters extremely simple. Taking out time consuming administrative tasks, a comprehensive trading solution allows you to focus on the task of building your brokerage. A good set up solution should provide brokerages with an express setup for instant licensing and ensure that its programs continue to meet regulation requirements.
- Good Risk management
Your risk management system needs to have the ability to process an enormous number of trades simultaneously. By having a robust dealing desk in place, you can control your risk by defining optional auto-coverage rules, minimize rejections, delays and your brokerage’s overall risk exposure.
- A Strong IT Department
Don’t underestimate the value of an advanced technology and support system that is needed to facilitate the operation of thriving brokerage. A hyper redundant datacenter, with full high availability, will allow for advanced computing, network and data storage capability, all the while keeping business continuity as its top priority.
Most importantly, a strong IT department will facilitate an extremely fast and accurate data feed, that will ensure a greater level of customer satisfaction. The live feed should deliver arbitrage-free and spike free rates for a broad spectrum of different instruments, be it Forex, CFD’s, Indices, Commodities, Stocks and Futures.
- Service team of trained professionals
An existing client is always more valuable than a new customer, and if you are going to allocate your resources, it needs to be on prioritizing the satisfaction and developing the loyalty of those who are already comfortable with using your brokerage.
This is achieved by having a well trained and well supported team of customer service professionals. Give your service team the knowledge and skills that will enable your brokerage to outperform your competition. Provide your sales and retention staff with useful educational resources which they can then provide to their traders. Furthermore, create a positive atmosphere with a high office moral and your clients will be the ones to thank-you.
- Automating the Conversion process
Automating the conversion process of your brokerage reduces the demand on marketing resources and makes client conversion much simpler. An automated conversion tool will give you the means to drive traffic to your website through your marketing campaigns, convert traffic into leads and then enable an effective and efficient process of converting those leads into customers.
Incredibly useful, an automated marketing conversion tool supports you in clearly defining your marketing goals and then facilitates the process of pushing prospects through the marketing funnel. A good automation tool should enable you to create appealing landing pages, properly segment your audience for highly targeted campaigns, promote each campaign to prospects at the relevant stages and then measure, monitor and optimize the results.
- Mobile trading apps
The future is undeniably moving towards mobile, with clients increasingly trading whilst on the go. To stay competitive, a brokerage needs to have an advanced trading system with the portability of an easily downloadable mobile application to service this growing demand. The mobile app should be consistently branded with the brokerage’s colors and logo, whilst also adaptable to a variety of systems, be it iPhone, Android and HTML5 compatible.
- Social Trading platform
Another trend in the forex market is the move towards social trading. Many trading novices like breaking into forex by using a social platform as it allows them to develop their trading skills and temperament whilst relying on the knowledge and expertise of those significantly advanced. Instead of having to immediately rely on their own ability, they can simply copy more advanced traders and still achieve good results.
If you are going to provide a forex social trading platform, you have to ensure that it has EU regulation compliance and that it is comprehensively integrated into your existing platform. A quality social trading platform will enable your clients to implement market decisions from a wide range of indicators that use a transparent, real time, social data feed of all the users in the social trading network.
