Forex Magnates reached out to Monex FX's President, Toshihiko Katsuya and tradable's Co-Founder & CEO Jannick Malling to discuss an ongoing partnership and the launch of live trading, slated to begin within the next few weeks.
Monex lies at the forefront of fx trading in Japan, having established itself as one of the biggest names in the country and region. The group has shown a penchant and willingness to embrace technology and innovation, highlighted by a bourgeoning relationship with tradable. Following a successful period of testing, Forex Magnates reporters have learned that the group will indeed be launching live trading for clients using tradable's platform by the end of August. An exclusive interview with both executives can be read below.
1. Can you describe Monex's partnership with tradable and will this help rekindle low fx volumes in light of low volatility?
(Toshihiko Katsuya) Monex went into strategic partnership with a Danish company, tradable aps last year. We have good relations with them and its parent company, CFH Group, and Monex has been licensed to tradable’s platform. We started offering demo accounts for customers and are now poised to launch live trading using tradable's platform by the end of August.
The beauty about the tradable platform is that customers can choose their favorite applications, amongst many other options. Additionally, we feel the customers can change their interface of the Trading Platform by locating different types of charts and applications. So if the customers can locate and use various currency charts and attractive apps, it is much easier for customers to pick up other currency pairs than the USD/JPY. Monex is also going to educate our customers on how to utilize the tradable platform. Our strategy is not just competing with lower pricing, but we offer more user-friendly trading applications and platforms for customers so that they will trade more with us.
As for the MT4, we have been offering the one customized by IBFX, our affiliate in the US since last August. MT4 is a great platform but tradable seems much easier for many customers to use because tradable’s platform is more intuitive for customers.
2. Do other Japanese brokers utilize this same strategy?
(Toshihiko Katsuya) Brokers can compete in a variety of ways in Japan, such as ultra tight spreads as seen in GMO Click and DMM. There are some other brokers that try to attract customers through their platform functionality. Money Square Japan is a very unique company as they offer a very automatic trading platform – also Invast Securities have an alliance with Tradency and they market the mirror trade in Japan successfully. Thus, brokers in Japan compete either through the price or the platform. The tradable platform is now exclusive onto Monex at this juncture so it’s very important to differentiate ourselves from our competitors in this respect.
3. What makes Japan so conducive to tradable's platform and what was the impetus behind working with Monex?
(Jannick Malling) We’re incredibly excited to be working with Monex in Japan. They have a legacy of innovation and they have shared the vision of tradable from the outset. They immediately saw how enabling third-party developers to innovate around a platform would result in greater choice and flexibility for their clients and how our partnership would benefit the industry as a whole. This became even more clear at the hackathon we recently hosted together in Tokyo, where developers and traders met up to develop new applications and services for our joint offering − with astonishing results.
We have been working closely with Monex to localize Tradable for the Japanese market and to ensure that regulatory and compliance standards are met, which is obviously something that both parties take very seriously. We’re now in final testing and are looking forward to putting a new trading experience in the hands of traders in Japan.
