How to keep operating costs down and still maximize onboarding of new clients

By Yael Warman, Leverate

A broker doing business in today’s market is jumping into an ocean of fierce competition. Add to this the scenario in which the enforcement of regulation is becoming stricter in many regulated markets, such as the EU, and previously unregulated markets such as Russia and UAE are beginning to implement regulations for non-bank financial services companies.

It is becoming more evident that for brokers to survive, they must look for ways to optimize every aspect of the acquisition and conversion process in order to increase their ROI.

One way in which brokers can effectively enhance and streamline the onboarding process, is by using automation. Automation of the onboarding process creates what is in essence, self-conversion of new traders, or traders who convert themselves, with minimal human interaction, in the form of support from a brokerage’s sales staff.

With automation, sales people are only required to intervene in the conversion process at critical decision-making points. By reducing the need for human interaction in order to take a trader from the acquisition stage to the conversion stage, a brokerage can limit the size of its call center, effectively decreasing expenses.

Besides decreasing expenses, a brokerage can reach new markets with the availability of multiple languages in automated on-boarding tools. Because automation allows for the conversion funnel to work 24 hours a day, a brokerage can make multiple time zones work to its advantage by hiring minimal additional sales staff to work in shifts.

Automated systems offer call to action features that are customizable and that can be adapted to the different traders’ interactions in order to optimize the process of conversion. Because a system’s response is instantaneous, the conversion process can occur much faster than if a trader had to wait for a sales rep to call back.

By implementing automated systems, such as Leverate’s SIRIXActive, a broker can persuade a potential customer to make a decision to convert while they are inside the system, expressing interest in the trading platform. A potential customer who enters into a platform’s guest or demo mode may provide fictive details only to move further in the process.

These are customers that a broker will have no way of contacting in the future, whereas a potential customer that is visiting a platform integrated with automation tools, can be contacted by the broker right on the platform, through a set of pre-scheduled roles and messages.

A broker has the ability to chat with a prospective customer when they are online, interested and engaged and because a broker knows exactly in what stage of the onboarding process the trader is, they can offer the right help at the right time, effectively maximizing the results of their marketing campaigns.

With automation, brokers facing competition, stricter regulation and tighter spreads, can effectively reduce their marketing costs and increase their conversion rates, thus improving their ROI.