Former Saxo Bank exec and FX marketing guru Morten Fillipsen leaves the industry, joins wine marketplace Vivino

After eleven years of prominence, regular conference appearances and interaction with some of the largest OTC FX and CFD companies in the business, Morten Fillipsen has left the FX industry.

This month, his tenure at MediaGroup Worldwide, where he was a partner in the firm and responsible for marketing efforts within the Asia Pacific region, came to an end signaling Mr Fillipsen’s final leadership position in the electronic trading business as he looks ahead to a future in the wine business.

Mr Fillipsen joins Vivino as Vice President, and in keeping with the majority of his commercial expertise, is responsible for the Asia Pacific operations of the firm, and continues to be based in Hong Kong.

Vivino is a wine marketplace, which is a new venture and intends to build a global, peer to peer and community based distribution channel for wines, hence Mr Fillipsen’s digital marketing and product placement experience gained in the very online FX industry is indeed relevant.

Mr Fillipsen leaves MediaGroup Worldwide, where he worked alongside fellow Saxo Bank alumnus Bart Burggraaf, after just one and a half years with the firm.

Whilst at MediaGroup Worldwide, Mr Fillipsen explained some the important localization requirements that are absolutely necessary when marketing a global and online product to an audience in the Asia Pacific during a discussion in Hong Kong.

At the time, FinanceFeeds noted that mr Fillipsen’s perspective was ”

“In terms of online operations, it has been said before and I will say it again, localization if you want to go into China is a must.”

“I have been approached by a number of company executives who explain that they have a global marketing strategy and that they are ready to go, but sometimes this causes delays on the website because some developers put a Facebook snippet on it or a it contains Google code. Developers in China know not to use Google or other major sites that are blocked.”

Mr. Fillipsen continued “The same applies to software developers that are using live chat to provide customers with access to customer support. My advice is to get rid of that, and use QQ because that is what everyone uses. I have seen brokers start off with live chat and then eventually realize that they must move to QQ. This kind of thing adds another layer of complexity for the clients.”

Finding staff that can work outside China is difficult, and a company operating like that would be constantly hit with internet limitations, no access to sites that they would need access to to be able to work aggressively with. Granted there are Chinese people outside China but even the language differences would present difficulties because it is Simplified in china and Traditional outside. It is not a hub for the region, instead it is really only viable to set up an office in China to focus completely on China and have regional approach elsewhere” – Morten Fillipsen

 

Mr Fillipsen joined MediaGroup Worldwide from a retail FX brokerage which he co-founded, that being Juno Markets.

Established in December 2014, the company was founded by Mr Fillipsen alongside his former colleague at Saxo Bank, Arthur Le, who is currently CEO of Juno Markets.

Mr Le was Managing Director for the APAC region for Saxo Bank for a short period, having been superseded by Adam Reynolds in 2012, and thus Mr Le had worked with Mr Fillipsen during that period before joining Leverate as Managing Director for APAC, where he was for two years until December 2014.

Whilst Mr Le remained at Juno Markets, Mr Fillipsen moved on in 2016.

Mr Fillipsen’s long-held perspective on the need to localize a global business to approach the APAC region is something he has made clear several times. He holds the view that Asia has in many cases not been approached correctly by many components of the FX industry.

On one side, he has witnessed Western brokerages that have come to ‘conquer’ Asia but still kept their trading servers in New York or London, still hosted their websites in the West and still insisted upon just applying ‘whatever works back home’ to this region, and then within Asia itself,locally run, unregulated brokers of questionable reputation that pray on novice traders with unrealistic bonus schemes and competitions.

This dichotomy is one of the factors that led him to found Juno Markets, and combine good quality Western business and technological ethos with an entity that was built for the APAC region’s specific requirements from the ground up.

A testimony to the level of ability within the alumni at Saxo Bank, many of whom have established their own niches in the FX business, Mr Fillipsen’s career at the Danish company extended across seven years, culminating in his position as Head of China.

Mr Fillipsen studied the Chinese language at the Beijing Language and Cultural University between 2000 and 2001 before attending Copenhagen Business School where he graduated with a Batchelor of Science degree in international business, leading to his study for a Master of Science qualification at the same institution, this time in Finance and Strategic Management, graduating in 2008.