OANDA Corporation looks to balance corporate risk by emphasizing data and payments businesses over FX trading

Technology-led Canadian electronic trading company OANDA Corporation has begun to look toward concentrating more on its data and payments business as CEO Ed Eger considers its platform to be a data platform rather than a trading platform.

With banks currently reducing their services toward firms that make cross-border payments in certain industry sectors and looking continually at increasingly conservative interbank practices, the provision of efficient commercial electronic payments at low cost is vital to many firms and individuals globally.

On this basis, OANDA Corporation expects that it is likely to experience a shift in the core business from which it derives the majority of its revenue from FX trading to data and payments.

Big data plays a large part in FX trading these days, and OANDA Corporation’s recording of data is no exception.

This morning, Mr. Eger explained “I don’t think of our platform as a trading platform, I think of it as a data platform. We record every trade and that is valuable.”

As OANDA Corporation brings forward the latest version of its fxTrade proprietary platform, the company’s alignment with payments and data as a form of major revenue is more of a commercial focus.

“A cross-border payment looks a lot like a one way trade” said Mr. Eger, whose experience in this matter is substantial, having held senior positions at PayPal and Citibank before joining OANDA Corporation in 2013 when he began an institutional effort to expand the payments and data side of the business.