Since leaving behind the success he made of the Alpari Group, the leading FX/CFD Broker he helped found, Andrey Vedikhin has kept a relatively low profile. Having established Your Bourse, a technology provider and matching engine with aggregator functionality, Andrey and his company have, up until recently, quietly gone about their business, growing the company, improving the product offering and agreeing on new partnerships. A spate of high profile partnerships brought Your Bourse much more into the public eye of late.
Finance Magnates got the opportunity to interview Andrey and learn more about Your Bouse, as well as getting his insights on the FX industry, the pandemic and more.
Q, Your Bourse is a relatively new player in the industry but already your Liquidity offering has gained traction. So far this year the company has announced a range of market partnerships. Will Your Bourse continue to expand its liquidity offering at the same rate for the remainder of the year?
First and foremost, we need to emphasize that we do not have our own liquidity offering as such. Instead, we have a pool of Liquidity Providers who provide fully disclosed liquidity to their clients using Your Bourse technology. So, when speaking about our ‘liquidity offering’ we’re rather referring to our liquidity partners.
We have only announced our key partnerships. Whilst, we have onboarded 99% of all tier two liquidity providers and most of the technology providers, as well as major banks, who have the highest traction within the FX and CFD industry. To be honest, there is nowhere to expand on the liquidity offering as we are nearing 100% coverage within the FX, CFD’s and crypto field.
Nonetheless, whenever we have a client approaching us with a need for an LP we’re not yet integrated with, we onboard them within days. Moreover, we are fully integrated with the majority of technology providers within the FX and CFD space, hence, in most cases, there is no integration needed at all.
Q. Your Bourse launched at a time when low levels of volatility were weighing heavily on the FX and crypto markets. Has the coronavirus pandemic increased demand for your product offering?
Frankly, we have always experienced high demand for our technology before we even started actively selling it and with the pandemic, the demand has only increased to the point where we have to artificially slow down the onboarding of new clients. Mainly, to ensure the highest level of services to the clients we already have in our pipeline.
What we noticed in the market since COVID started was that WFH mode made many executives review their business processes and operations. Brokers are now seeking to find ways to optimise the spendings and
Andrey Vedikhin, Founder and CEO of Your Bourse
increase profits as never before. And this is where Your Bourse comes into play. As we are focusing on delivering not only tech solutions but also business reporting and client analysis tools. Your Bourse platform addresses all the IT, connectivity and operational needs of brokers and goes beyond that by empowering them with profound data Analytics to calibrate their business decisions on a daily basis and gradually increase profitability.
Another recent addition to our services range, which is not connected with the pandemic, though, is dedicated hosting for MT4 and MT5 and MT4 White Label offering in partnership with the market veterans Itexsys. These additions and collaborations are also the results of the increasing market demand. We provide hosting in all Equinix data centers, as well as Google Cloud, all backed by advanced DDOS protection and 24/7 Monitoring and Technical Support.
Q. Although COVID has provided a boost to volatility, it has not been free of challenges. How has Your Bourse navigated the difficult landscape of 2020?
Your Bourse is a team of very enthusiastic fintech professionals coming from retail FX and CFD, liquidity, banking, FinTech and HFT backgrounds. We have always been flexible in regards to working hours and the physical location of our employees. In fact, Your Bourse had been practicing remote work as part of our contingency plan even before COVID, hence, when we had to face the lockdown and self-isolation restrictions, we were fully ready to move to the home office environment, with our team members going above and beyond 'office hours'.
Q. Heightened volatility has brought with it liquidity issues, especially with assets such as gold and oil. How did Your Bourse’s Liquidity Hub deal with liquidity squeezes?
Your Bourse platform has seven levels of spike filters. Some of the filters are adjusted during the onboarding process according to the client’s business needs, others are algorithm-based and adjust automatically according to the market conditions. These filters provide excellent protection for our clients during the thin or uncertain market. Of course, there’s no universal solution to all liquidity issues, but our current setup and its flexibility helped us lead our clients by the hand during the 2020 turmoil.
Q. Multi-asset appears to be the future for trading providers. How can Your Bourse help brokers expand their offering and remain resilient during difficult times?
Your Bourse is a multi-asset platform supporting trading in all symbols available in MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, as well as some non-traditional financial instruments such as crypto spot. We support all financial instruments except options. We chose not to add options as we do not see much demand for it in the industry. For example, although MetaTrader 5 natively supports options, we do not know a single broker who has options in their portfolio.
Q. What is the current focus of Your Bourse?
Whilst, Your Bourse as a platform-as-a-service consists of many features, such as exchange class matching engine, liquidity aggregator, MT4 bridge and MT5 gateway and FIX API, we are currently focusing on improving reporting and client analysis.
We believe that profound business reporting and client analysis is the key to success in our field as it gives brokers all the necessary data to back their day-to-day decisions and allows them to increase their profitability. Your Bourse empowers brokers to increase their profitability by providing the right tools without having to do any structural changes to the company.
Based on the collective experience of our management team, we have come to the conclusion that liquidity management is another important factor contributing to brokers’ profitability. At Your Bourse, we have further developed this knowledge and went beyond what is currently offered on the market. Our next step is fine-tuning our AI-based client analysis tool that is currently being beta tested and will be launched in Q1 of 2021.
Q. What motivated you to create Your Bourse? What need does the company aim to meet?
I saw an opportunity to fill the gap in the industry and decided to go for it. At Alpari UK, I had a technological vision for the company, which I’ve brought into life. However, the product we created at Alpari UK, although brilliant, was company-specific. Hence, the technology created at the time was not easily packaged to be sold or white labelled to other brokers. Simply, as the solution was very entangled with other Alpari UK internal products. Moreover, it would have been a conflict of interest to 'sell' the main competitive advantage of the firm to other brokers.
Therefore, when the opportunity presented itself, I decided to create a fintech company, that will have no affiliation with other brokers and that can go even further in terms of technological advancement. It was a logical step, as competition in this field is simply non-existent. All the solutions currently available on the market are very far from what brokers truly need in order to manage their liquidity, exposure and flow and increase profitability, by simply tweaking those parameters. We’re talking about improving brokers' profitability by 'clicking a few buttons' and assigning correct settings. And I believe that data is the key here. That’s why we at Your Bourse pay special attention to our reporting and client analysis and that’s our main focus now.
Your Bourse has no conflict of interest and does not promote any liquidity providers, nor has limitations in terms of which clients can be onboarded. Our first priority is always our client’s profitability and success. Last but not least, we do not charge liquidity providers for streaming their flow and are always acting in our client’s best interests, being truly independent.
Q. What lessons have you brought from your previous experience and injected them into Your Bourse?
I have experience from building a financial broker from scratch, from 0 to 300 billion turnover broker. I’ve gone from a small to a massive broker, from unregulated, to a broker regulated in 11 most ridged jurisdictions, from a company running in one country to having offices in 52 countries.
Our well-balanced team of geniuses combined has extensive experience in running and building successful fintech, HFT’s and liquidity providers businesses. Together, we do not only create a piece of art technological solution but fill all gaps in regards to running a financial business. We gladly share our knowledge in all fields with our clients to help them grow their business and increase their profitability, being it a set up they already have or helping them change to tap into the true potential of their flow.
Andrey Vedikhin is the Founder and CEO of Your Bourse
