Forex education conundrum: Exclusive interview with Tradimo’s Sebastian Kuhnert on opening the platform to third party educators

Forex education is viewed as a vital retention tool for most FX brokerages these days, especially in times of very high client acquisition costs.

Tradimo today took the cause of online FX educational resources a step further by opening its platform to allow third party educators to add their content to Tradimo’s system.

The company, which is owned by CFH Group, has taken educational resources a stage further and has set the scene for totally interactive FX resource for retail traders. Today, FinanceFeeds spoke to Sebastian Kuhnert, CEO of Tradimo, to go into great detail on this development.

By opening up the Tradimo training website, it is clear that the company understands the value in education for retail FX customers. How will the material be moderated in order that good quality information can be provided?

The new platform will be developed and rolled out on a step by step basis, adding new features every two weeks and incorporating everything that we learn along the way from learners, instructors, brokers and other FinTech partners which means that the way we moderate it is not set in stone.

We plan to launch new courses in a private preview to our most loyal members, allowing instructors to incorporate their feedback before opening a course to a wider audience. That audience will be able to provide their feedback publicly, once again allowing the instructor to make adjustments if and where needed or use that feedback as inspiration for an additional course.

As the number of instructors grows, we would like to introduce a peer-review model which helps high-ranked instructors and highly-rated users from the tradimo community provide feedback to each other and form tighter bonds similar to how academic journals operate. Initially, our own staff will also play an important role in quality assurance.

Do you anticipate that the ability for trainers and educators to put their own content on the Tradimo site will attract brokerages to use the service as the variation of information can be used as a retention tool to increase lifetime value of clients?

We receive a lot of inquiries from very different kinds of brokers, software and service providers all over the financial industry looking to launch new products, attract new clients, widen the reach of their brands or retain clients better with our help. Some of these offer almost identical products to their clients but their staff have great experience in trading themselves so their goal is to establish a more differentiated brand through education.

We want to be the best vehicle for them to achieve this. Others have very novel products that can serve as differentiators in themselves. However, in our experience most of them require education for retail clients to understand their true value – and that’s where we want to help innovators to maximise opportunities and convey the amazing value of their creations.

How will Tradimo avoid bogus trainers (of which there are many) using this as a platform to sell their dubious software or to push their high pressure sales techniques for their courses?

We are very proud of the informed attitude many of our users have acquired. Most likely dubious content simply would not be accepted by our target group and receive bad ratings. The reputation of tradimo as a platform will always be more important than the revenues from a single course. Therefore we would also step in ourselves if we saw any misleading content.

Will this be available in multiple languages? Chinese IBs are the focus of many FX firms these days, and due to Chinese government regulations on FX, IBs must be either an education or information service. Do you plan to leverage this for the benefit of Western firms?

We have localised all our existing tradimo educational content into Chinese, Arabic, German, Russian and English and the new system will allow us to start new languages also with just a few courses and explore the market together with participating brokers.

In this way our own courses will form an attractive basis for each market that we want to enter and allow other educators and partners to build on with their own courses in order to explore such opportunities.

We also see our multi-language support as an opportunity for Western educators who have built up great educational content and recognition, but have not considered leveraging that on an international scale. Together with brokers interested in sponsoring that content, we can facilitate localisation into new markets and create a win-win-win-win situation between brokers, educators, new audiences and tradimo.