Looks like the race for mainland Europe is not just in the hands of FXCM or Saxo Bank as other smaller firms are obviously interested in setting up shop there as well. Alpari just announced the opening of its new office in Frankfurt headed by ex-FalcoFX Heiko Muller (Congrats Heiko!) and FxPro set up shop in Madrid. At this point, Europe (except the UK) is not very crowded and except a few very localized brokers there is much room for big brokers expansion. I expect that the US brokers, specifically FXCM and Gain, who are driven out of the US by the CFTC rules to start putting more emphasis on new offices in Europe.
FXCM is probably the most dominant broker in Europe with physical offices in the UK (another UK office coming up shortly? ;) ), France, Germany, Italy and Greece. FXCM also has been a long time fan of the Northern European region.
Saxo Bank on the other hand maintains a much different approach and believes in a more centralized model where it doesn't have too many offices (except a few in Eastern Europe and Japan) and by putting more emphasis on White Labels.
Alpari:
The new Alpari Deutschland office, on the 29th floor of Frankfurt's landmark skyscraper, the Messeturm, will serve Germany as well as German-speaking individual traders and institutional customers in Austria and Switzerland.
Heiko Müller, the new General Manager of Alpari (DE), said: "Our objective is to expand Alpari's business in the German-speaking markets, offering retail and institutional clients with innovative currency trading technology combined with best execution, competitive pricing, and dedicated local customer support".
In 2009, Alpari (UK)'s customer base in the German speaking region more than trebled, driven by the buoyant growth of Forex trading in these markets. The new German office brings the Alpari Group's operations closer to its customers across the region, delivering institutional-level trading services and technologies, developed by its Research & Development team.
The Alpari Group is one of the world's fastest growing providers of online Forex Trading services, with 190,000 live accounts worldwide and monthly trading volumes in excess of USD 100 billion.
FxPro:
It is FxPro's sixth country representative office created since operations began in 2008.
The launch of the office is another milestone achieved in FxPro's organic growth strategy, with the aim of building presences in geographic markets that represent strong commercial opportunities and help to roll out services to clients with language support that serve those markets.
Located in the prestigious Salamanca district in the heart of Madrid, the FxPro representative office comprises a team whose operational focus is to provide comprehensive customer services support to all Spanish and Portuguese speaking clients not only in Spain and Portugal, but also to those clients worldwide.
Iker Eguiluz Cuadrado, Operations Manager for FxPro in Spain, spoke about the importance of servicing clients in Spanish and Portuguese. "When you consider that Spanish alone is spoken by over 320 million people, is the official or national language in over 20 countries, and Portuguese has over 210 million native speakers, it is clearly good business to ensure that we deliver our services in these languages. We're now delighted to be doing so not only through our Customer Support team, but also through our dedicated Spanish language website and our forthcoming Portuguese site."
