Tools For Brokers’ CEO highlights their liquidity connection with Binance
Trusted by thousands of brands, the annual iFX EXPO series has achieved immense prestige since it was first started a decade ago. This year’s edition drew industry experts and connected high-level executives in the financial services and fintech from around the world.
FinanceFeeds Editor in Chief Nikolai Isayev spoke to Alexey Kutsenko, Founder and CEO of Tools For Brokers (TFB).
Under Alexey’s visionary leadership, TFB has become an international business that provides a full range of products to customers in all parts of the world. Being both tech and business savvy, Alexey continues to bring fresh and innovative ideas to the FX market.
Though retail trading has cooled over the past few months, this segment remains a significant participant in the market and first-time investors are still more active than they were prior to the pandemic. Against this backdrop, we asked Mr Alexey about what retail traders are specifically looking for today? And how does Tools for Brokers, driven by intense competition, help their brokerage clients respond to the popularity of millennial-friendly trading apps?
Firstly, Kutsenko expects this overall heightened level of retail engagement to persist. As a result, his company spent a lot of resources last year to further develop their flagship product, ‘Trade Processor.’ The latter is a liquidity bridge and market-making order pool for offering the features necessary to manage an entire brokerage business.
As he states, brokers can use the product to improve liquidity management while trading forex and cryptocurrencies. It provides connectivity with multiple liquidity channels, and options for several sessions with one provider, as well as multiple levels of access for users and managers of the system.
TFB CEO also highlighted the release of the new edition of the Trade Processor liquidity bridge, which features several client-facing upgrades and backend enhancements. The recent upgrade added new liquidity providers to the ecosystem, namely cTrader and Binance.
“Also, we have added a synthetic instrument feature which allows our brokerages to create specific instruments based on data feed they already have and provide whatever amount of instruments to their clients.”
Synthetic instruments, continues Alexey, enable brokers to expand their existing offerings and provide traders with unique tradable pairs, making them more competitive and helping them stand out.
He added that TFB now allows their brokers to offer spot and futures crypto trading, expanding their products catalog and targeting new client groups.
Risk management is also enhanced with the introduction of internal hedging, which adds automation and better management of exposure by instrument. If volumes exceed brokers’ thresholds, they can hedge them on the liquidity side, explains CEO and founder.
“It’s really cool, because with such integration, they are able to offer more instruments and more opportunities to their traders, especially on weekends, because cryptos are traded 24/7. Brokers nowadays have to follow this trend, because if people aren’t able to trade on weekends, they will go somewhere else.”
Kutsenko also shared his insights about the regulatory challenges that brokers might face. In particular, he described how the cryptocurrency space is taking several hits in many countries, which are now concerned about its unregulated and unstifled growth in recent years.
TFB founder argues that regulation is essential for the crypto industry and will go a long way towards building trust with stakeholders interested in the space. Ultimately, it takes proper regulation to realize crypto mass adoption, and he believes in facilitating this in a healthy way through proactively collaborating with regulators.
“What we see right now is lack of regulation in some countries, which makes crypto a gray area of business. Binance, for example, has been under pressure from regulators in some regions. However, regulation is good for everyone. Because when it’s regulated, everyone understands the rules and follows them to offer quality service to the clients. I think that we’re currently in a stage where the regulators and big players are searching for some balance, they are just trying to find a way how it should be done.”
Do you agree that some brokers sometimes tend to overlook risk management tools, asked FinanceFeeds Editor in Chief Nikolai Isayev.
In his reply, Alexey noted that as brokers go multi-asset nowadays, they increasingly need a comprehensive suite of risk management tools that delivers consistent, consolidated results across their entire business. Speaking of their own offering, he highlighted TFB’s enterprise solution that provides credible valuations and comprehensive asset class coverage. Their multiple solutions encompass a broad spectrum of financial instruments to enable brokers and their clients to analyze their trading and portfolios, manage and mitigate their exposure and ready themselves for any turn of events.
“Risk management is one of the top questions right now, because all brokers think about that, especially when they start to offer multi-asset trading. They have to be more skilled in risk management in different areas, because the process in forex is totally different compared to, for example, crypto.”
Established in 2009, Tools for Brokers provides software solutions to brokerage firms in foreign exchange and cryptocurrency trading. The company is also a provider of a money management solution PAMM, a data management and reporting product Broker Business Intelligence (BBI), and White Label.
