The crowded trading market has ramped up the demand for technology providers. Many big and small companies now offer trading technologies like licensing trading platforms, among other services. One company that has been around in this sector for the last 20 years is Devexperts.

Finance Magnates recently sat down with Michael Babushkin, the CEO of Devexperts, as the company celebrated its 20th anniversary. He has been heading the company for more than 12 years now.

Devexperts, now offering a trading platform to brokers, benefited significantly from the recent ban of MetaTrader platforms on Apple’s App Store. Now, it is expanding its product offerings to cover a broader market. Recently, it added support for spread betting to DXtrade and partnered with other industry players.

A Fireside Chat with Michael Babushkin, CEO of Devexperts

The chat with Finance Magnates (FM) and Babushkin (BM) touched on many topics such as competition, brokers’ preference for third-party techs, and the company’s future prospects. Here is the full text of the interview.

Michael, can you please explain Devexperts’ services, and how the company has evolved over the past 20 years?

Over the past two decades, Devexperts has transformed from a fintech-focused software development company building customer solutions into a full-blown product organization. We’ve matured in our offerings and size, growing from a small team of 35 people to just under 1000 employees now.

Upon the company’s inception, we started creating custom products for various brokerages and have built around 40 various trading platforms from scratch. That gave us a unique and thorough understanding of the pain points of different players in the market.

Through this experience, we became capable of launching our own universal multi-asset and extendable trading platform, DXtrade. This product has three main configurations catering to different market segments: CFD/FX brokers, crypto brokers, and those who offer listed securities (Stocks, Options, Futures, ETFs, and Bonds). We also offer our DXmatch solution for exchanges and dark pools, it’s “an exchange in a pocket” kind of solution. DXmatch is suitable for players who want to act as market makers while having a retail branch for investors and traders, charting widgets, and historical and real-time market data directly from exchanges. Our value-added services on top of the DXtrade platform led to a great increase in our customer base.

We’ve also recently been involved in a hype project in the non-fungible token space developing an NFT marketplace for our client.

Check out the recent London Summit session on "Advances in Trading Technology" where Jon Light, VP of Trading Solutions at Devexperts, was a panelist.

There are many trading technology providers today. How is Devexperts different from other technology vendors on the market, and why?

Over the years, we’ve started seeing clients as partners. After all, it’s a fairly small industry, even looking globally. What we strive to achieve is to be a partner our clients can grow with. We don’t vendor-lock our clients and provide our customers with flexibility and ownership of the most important asset in their business, the technology.

We also understand maturing brokers’ needs. They want technology tailored to their processes, business models, and strategies. Hence, we customize our products for an ideal setup for them. We’ve noticed that other technology vendors struggle with this aspect, and we consider it key for helping our clients perform at their best.

Devexperts is also different because of our age. The market entry threshold is high, much like staying in the business for a long time. For example, when attending industry gatherings such as at iFX Expo, there’s always a new vendor exhibiting, but next year, they’re gone. Our regular presence at industry events demonstrates our stability and that our brokers trust us with their future.

Brokers have two options, develop their own technology or license a third-party platform. Why do brokers choose third-party platforms, like yours, over proprietary tech?

Imagine you like cars and are good at driving them, but how good are you at building them? The same analogy applies here. A broker would need a fairly large and diverse IT department, experienced product and project managers, and plenty of time to focus on building trading technology. Given the complexity of technology and trading, finding, onboarding, and managing an IT department is quite time-consuming. Add to that the lack of available talent and increasing developer costs, and the math is fairly easy.

We provide clients with ready-to-deploy products, so the time to market is quick. Doing so allows them to focus on what is most important, attracting and retaining quality traders. We’ve had numerous occasions where large clients debated building in-house or collaborating with technology vendors. In the rare cases where they decided to run a project in-house, some still come back for support in building certain modules.

We even work with brokers with proprietary tech and either implement modules from our platforms or work with their teams on their code.

Where do you see competing vendors fail to be as flexible as you?

The main reason for working with vendors like us is that we let brokers focus on their core business and leave the technology part to us. We honor brokers’ independence and never lock them within a single liquidity hub or make them dependent on 3rd party plug-ins. Unlike some other charting providers, we don’t make them share user contact details and gain control over their user base.

They’re relieved from headaches associated with working with multiple tech vendors for the different modules and layers of their business. We offer front-to-back trading solutions with sophisticated Risk Management, Order Management, and flexible trading front-ends, as well as APIs to connect to any complimentary software. Hence, with our products, brokers don’t need to spend money on extra tools, such as bridges, meaning no extra costs for unnecessary plug-ins.

What’s next for Devexperts? What’s your focus area in the short and long term?

We plan to invest even more in our products, increase the AI part in our platforms, and develop social trading features. Even in very saturated market segments, we can outperform the competition. Besides trading platforms and exchange solutions, we also plan to expand our business with complementary business lines to offer a one-stop shop for brokers.

Service consolidation is happening at OTC brokers: in addition to classic offerings, they have started adding stocks and futures, and we’re ready to do this. Another trend is that crypto is going to be even more regulated. It’ll make crypto brokerage businesses more difficult to run because of the increasing KYC and AML requirements, but we’re ready to support brokers. Our platform is designed to satisfy regulators’ strict requirements.