As MetaTrader 5 set to go viral, FinanceFeeds speaks to Gold-i CEO Tom Higgins as the firm embraces multi-faceted platform innovation

Earlier this week, British trading platform integration and liquidity management solution provider Gold-i concluded the development of its new MetaTrader 5 Gateway which is scheduled to be launched at the end of this month.

The ultra-low latency Gold-i MT5 Gateway launches with access to over 70 Liquidity Providers and provides the fastest and most reliable integration between retail and institutional financial trading systems.

Gold-i’s MT5 Gateway has been designed to work with Matrix, which is a modular multi-asset liquidity management platform, the result being that brokers using MetaTrader 5 can aggregate incoming liquidity feeds and offer their own liquidity out to clients, providing significant opportunities for them to diversify, add new revenue streams, reduce risk and differentiate from competitors.

Additionally, Gold-i has undertaken a redesign of its corporate website and increased its marketing collateral in order to continue its innovative methodology, and to further its ability to serve brokers internationally whilst the MetaTrader 5 platform gains ground.

This morning, FinanceFeeds spoke to Tom Higgins, CEO of Gold-i, who explained the imminent popularity of the MetaTrader 5 platform, how its relationship between trading environment and customer will be maximized and what the corporate direction is for 2017.

“MetaTrader 5 is a superior platform to MetaTrader 4 and there is no doubt that it will become the platform of choice for brokers in the near future” explained Mr. Higgins this morning.

“In order to accelerate uptake, two areas need to be addressed” he continued. Firstly, there needs to be more support from third party vendors such as Gold-i, providing Liquidity Bridges and multi account manager (MAM) products for MetaTrader 5 with the same functionality as brokers are used to for MetaTrader 4.”

“In addition, the EAs need to be re-written in MQL5 so that they are also adapted from MetaTrader 4 to MetaTrader 5. This all takes time as it involves complex development. I think we will start to see significant uptake of MetaTrader 5 within the next six months” explained Mr. Higgins.

Gold-i recently celebrated its 8th birthday, which represents a milestone in terms of electronic trading integration and liquidity management companies for the retail FX sector. How have the last 8 years been in terms of development of the retail execution model, and what did Gold-i need to innovate and develop over this period to be able to lead and remain a pinnacle in the relationship between retail brokerage, trading platform providers and Tier 1 liquidity providers?

Innovation is at the heart of all of our product development, combined with a focus on developing software with tangible business benefits for MetaTrader brokers – whether helping them to make more money, cut costs, reduce risk or differentiate from competitors.

Gold-i is renowned for pushing boundaries and we are very proud to have created a number of industry first products over the last 8 years – including being the first to develop the technology to transform MetaTrader 4 into a multi-asset trading platform and the first company to add risk management features to an MetaTrader 4 Bridge.

Our Matrix liquidity management platform is our most recent game changer – there really is nothing out there like Matrix. I believe it will set world standards for Liquidity management. It allows a broker to configure how they consume liquidity and enables them to sell multi-asset liquidity to their clients as well.

The redesign of the Gold-i website and increased marketing collateral represent a new era and part of the need to continue innovating. What factors will this concentrate on, and how important the new site’s functionality will be to brokers, platform developers and liquidity partners alike?

Gold-i has certainly moved into a new era because we have evolved into a global business, with offices in China, Japan and Turkey in addition to our UK-based headquarters, and a truly global client base. We see ourselves very much as a micro-multinational and the new website reflects this. It will be available in multiple languages in 2017.

In terms of content, we have increased the quality and the amount of information we share with partners and clients. We have a growing team of sales people globally and needed to make sure that we have consistent messaging and sales collateral in key languages. Our focus is very much on communicating the benefits to brokers of partnering with Gold-i.

What new products and innovations can we look forward to post-redesign?

We will be looking at enhancements to Matrix to take us into the institutional space. We’re also focusing heavily on MT5 product development, with our MAM Pro for MT5 launching in Q1 2017. We will also look at further enhancements to Gold-i Visual Edge – our impressive risk management and business intelligence tool.

In April, during a meeting in London with Gold-i senior executives, the subject of MetaTrader 5 usurping MetaTrader 4 as the de facto trading platform for retail brokerage was discussed.

The MetaTrader 5 platform has been, until relatively recently, notable by its almost complete absence from the entire retail FX ecosystem, despite it having been launched in June 2010, to a wave of tumultuous silence.

Foresight in innovation

During that meeting, Mr. Higgins explained with great foresight, how he envisaged MetaTrader 5’s imminent rise to prominence. “Once the integration technology has caught up, this will cause MetaTrader 5 to provide a far better experience for brokers and traders alike.”

“There is a lot of work required on the side of the software vendors, but once that has happened we will be migrating people from MetaTrader 4 to MetaTrader 5 as a service and it will come with Matrix 2 as well as our bridge and other products like MAM that we will bring across to MetaTrader 5″ revealed Mr. Higgins.

“Within six to nine months our MetaTrader 5 integrations will be fully productized and all the liquidity providers that we have integrated with on MT4 will also be available on MetaTrader 5. However, we will start to see new brokers just taking MT5 and this will change the landscape substantially” he said.

Indeed this has occurred, as just over six months from that particular meeting, the MetaTrader 5 Gateway is now ready for launch.

Brokerages and traders alike can now quite confidently await the global uptake of MetaTrader 5, leading to reduced costs for brokerages as they only need one server for their entire global brokerage operations compared to a server per location with MetaTrader 4, and a more refined trading environment all round.