Movers & Shakers: Natallia Hunik talks prime brokerage, a good night’s sleep, and linguistic amusement

A new year, a new era of innovation, and in the fast-moving FX industry, those at the cutting edge who are not content with simply going through the motions and emulating their peers before heading home at the end of the working day will likely reveal yet more industry-changing developments.

To give an insight into the personality, charisma and just what makes such things happen, FinanceFeeds met with some of the movers and shakers of the industry for an open and casual discussion on what the industry is likely to look like, with a splash of comedy for those who appreciate.

Today, here in Hong Kong, FinanceFeeds met with Natallia Hunik, Head of Institutional Sales at Advanced Markets and Fortex, who detailed the progress that has been made since she brought her entire team to the company to lead its commercial direction.

What’s new?

This past year has been one of the busiest in my career. I joined Advanced Markets and Fortex in March and immediately dived headlong into the dynamic culture of the two companies. This has been a great year, full of learning new things and a year of building and laying the foundation for a new pace-setting enterprise. We have done a lot already but still have a long list to accomplish in 2016.

Here are a few of the initiatives that we embarked upon in 2015:

1. We began by designing and building a completely new marketing strategy for both companies that focused on brand building and articulating our value proposition to prospective clients via multiple channels.

2. We successfully launched a content management strategy focused on educating FX market participants on the inner workings of the institutional market and also discussed the hottest industry topics.

3. We secured UBS as our primary prime brokerage

4. We introduced the turnkey “Quick Start Brokerage Program” for clients looking to get started as an FX brokerage at an affordable entry point.

5. We expanded our institutional offering with a number of CFD instruments.

6. We upgraded our network infrastructure and introduced “Fortex Premium Hosting” packages in our dedicated facilities at NY4 and HK3

7. We launched “Fortex WebTrader”, a fully responsive, next generation web trading platform.

What else is new?

I’m finally sleeping through the night (8 hours, yay!) thanks to Richard Ferber’s  “Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems“ that finally has my son sleeping after 6 months of exhausting, restless nights and copious amounts of coffee to stay awake throughout the day. On a more serious note, it also helps that Fortex’s robust technology remains stable (and doesn’t fail) during all market conditions so there’s no need for me to be woken up by phone calls about outages and poor connectivity.

Ok, so nobody is perfect. What is the biggest thing you can improve on from last year?

I am definitely not perfect and I readily admit that. I can certainly improve by using more emojis when communicating as I don’t think I utilize their full potential in today’s digital world!  This is just such a great way to transcend your mood and to be laconic at the same time. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but I also read somewhere that you need to repeat something 10,000 times in order to become a master of it…. now, please don’t hurry to unfriend me!

We simply need to always strive to improve on how we articulate our values and value proposition and to have consistent updates flowing to the FX community.

What is the funniest thing or incident that happened in the office last year? Any cringe or epic fail moments?

Those happen with us on almost a daily basis! We are a very dynamic and diverse team and I would say that we work to create those epic moments!

This example is very fresh in my memory:

Lately, Skype added their long-awaited translator feature (for those who may be unaware, click here!) Our entire office was ecstatic about it and right away started reaching out to our global connections in their native languages. I have to admit, people were impressed.

This translation tool works amazingly well for simple sentences and phrases.

So after a morning of having fun with this, the next thing I hear is one of the salespeople getting on a cold call with someone from Latin America. The conversation is getting kind of bumpy around the description of our services and the person on the other side of the line gives up, and asks the sales person if they speak Spanish. Our crafty employee replied, ”Can you please add me on Skype? I will speak Spanish there!”

If we are sitting here in one year from now discussing what you as a company have achieved in 2016, what do you hope to be the big achievements?

We have a lot of plans for 2016, here are just a few:-

To expand our global footprint.

To further develop our CFD offering.

The launching of our “xForce” Prime of Prime Suite to empower brokers to act as true liquidity providers to their own partners.

Adding infrastructure in LD4. In 2015, we successfully launched premium hosting services at our facilities in NY4 and HK3 (Fortex has private cages in these datacenters). Our secure environment potentially saved clients a lot of money in the wake of summer cyber instability within the FX community.

If your company morphed into a super-hero or animal in 2016, what would it be?

Although there are a few that come to mind, I would have to say “Ironman” because we are unshakeable and super-confident in our product, technology and business team. I truly believe that we have the right mixture of ‘”know-how” and ‘”can-do” to back this up.