London takes charge of over 30% of the worlds Foreign Exchange Trading. Strategically located between Asia, Europe and the Americas it's an ideal location for global business transactions. Since the NFA rulings on order execution and leverage the world’s largest FX brokers established new offices under the Financial Services Authority to take advantage of London’s reputation, position and business potential.
This trend has now extended to continents beyond, with Valbury, one of South East Asia’s largest financial services institutions, recently announcing that it has backed the successful launch of new London based broker Valbury Capital.
Forexmagnates’ London team caught up with Mark Hanney, CEO of Valbury Capital Limited to get an insight in to the firm and what they are looking to achieve.
Please provide a background about the firm.
I will start by giving you some background about myself and Valbury.
I originally trained as a Chartered Accountant with Arthur Andersen before holding executive roles at leading brokers; Cantor Fitzgerald (now BGC), Jefferies and Refco. In 2006, I was one of the founding directors of Marex (now Marex Spectron).
Since 1989 Valbury has been developing its broking business throughout South-east and Central Asia. The firm provides a wide range of services and products including FX, equity, bond, commodity, derivative and asset management products to institutional, professional traders and experienced private clients.
Through the establishment of Valbury Capital in London, Valbury is looking to develop itself in Europe as a mid-market broker both to meet the growing demand by Asian investors to operate in the highly regulated markets in London and across Europe; and to offer a specialist gateway for European traders and investors to gain access to the Asian marketplace.
Why has Valbury chosen to expand its business in London, Why under the FSA? and not NFA, CySec or closer home ASIC in Australia or Singapore?
We consider that a London based broker offers significant benefits to clients and will become an increasingly attractive location for Asian clients.
The presence of an internationally respected regulator (the Financial Services Authority) gives our clients throughout the world the confidence of knowing that their counterparty is required to comply with world class capital, client money segregation and conduct of business rules.
London is a primary global hub, and our clients can benefit from the highly developed Liquidity , products, platforms and skilled staff available here. It is also located in a centralised time zone that is convenient for many of our clients
What can traders look forward to trading with Valbury?
Our view that there is an increasing polarisation of the market place, a growing void between the services provided by the investment banks, and those offered by retail and spreadbetting firms. The recent demise of MF Global will only increase this polarisation.
Several banks and retail brokers are making efforts bridge this gap, but we firmly believe that this is not a substitute for the client service value that can be provided by a dedicated mid-market broker such as Valbury Capital.
We operate a service orientated broking model that effectively combines the benefits of multi-platform e-trading with 24 hour voice execution and a designated account executive as standard. In addition, most of our staff have worked together before, so although we are a new company we have a settled team, which is important in enabling us to deliver great client service from the outset.
We believe that this combination of technology, expertise and client service will be valued by clients.
Who is your typical client?
Valbury’s Asian businesses operate across a diverse client space from high end retail through to corporate and financial institutions. We intend to emulate this.
Another feature of our Asian business that we intend to emulate is the emphasis on client relationship. We believe that this focus on providing services based on an established and lasting client relationship will make us stand out.
Our typical client would be an experienced market participant who is looking for a professional, client driven broker, but who perhaps feels that the large broker or bank is too anonymous and impersonal.
How was your experience dealing with your regulator?
Our experience of dealing with our regulator was very positive and we were able to obtain approval within 5 months.
Good governance starts with having the right people. We have put together an experienced team at both management and board level that is backed by highly credible investors and professional advisers. These factors, together with a well developed business plan, certainly assisted the regulatory approval process
I was particularly pleased to be able to welcome Julian Courtney onto the Board as a non executive director. Julian was the Compliance Director of Marex, and we had worked closely together and with the FSA when establishing Marex as a regulated broker-dealer.
Where do you see Valbury UK in 3 years time?
Our initial strategy objective is to enable Valbury to be able to offer clients a European regulated broker account and to establish our market reputation as a relationship broker delivering superior client service.
This will initially focus on Forex , with the objective of providing our clients with highly competitive pricing delivered through a choice of institutional and retail orientated platforms.
We believe that having full control over your liquidity sources will be critical going forward, and we have therefore opted to develop our own pricing from direct multi-bank liquidity sources instead of relying on anonymous aggregated price feeds.
We will seek to add additional product classes, platforms and services as soon as prudent and where consistent with the needs of our clients. We would initially like to emulate the product classes currently offered by Valbury in Asia, and will then work closely with our Asian colleagues to expand the Valbury’s global product offering.
Forexmagnates’ team thanks Valbury Capital for their time and wishes them success.
