After a long period of negotiations which started about a year ago, Beeks FX VPS has unveiled to reporters of Forex Magnates, that it has acquired Gallant VPS to form the biggest player by far in the industry of providing retail traders with virtual private server (VPS) services.
With latency issues on top of the agenda of traders from emerging markets as FX trading has become increasingly popular in Asia, Beeks FX VPS is experiencing growth for its services primarily from APAC - China and Emerging Asia are some of the most popular destinations where a VPS service is desirable if a retail client wants to use expert advisors or trade through an API.
With the Gallant takeover deal, Beeks FX VPS is setting up a physical office in the US to add to their existing UK and Asian offices and the ability to add new technology to its portfolio. It already has deals with 9 of the 10 biggest forex brokers in the world, including FXCM, Oanda and GAIN Capital. While the Gallant brand will disappear, the technology developed by the acquired company will complement Beeks' Windows solution with a Linux-based offering along with a full back office and API for brokers to effectively manage white labeling.
After the deal, the only other sizable player in delivery of retail VPS services for FX trading is Commercial Network Services, haling from the US.
Forex Magnates talked exclusively to Beeks' CEO, Gordon McArthur, and asked him a brief set of questions about the acquisition and the company's performance and plans going forward.
Let's start from who really needs to use a VPS service these days amongst retail investors? What is the geographical distribution of your clients?
Our clients fall into two groups - some really need to use a VPS because they are running automated trading through an expert advisor (EA), or as is the case with some emerging markets, where many people don't own their own PC, clients use only their mobile devices for trading. Latency issues also come in, especially for our clients who are running an EA out of China.
About 70% of our client base comes from emerging markets, mainly from Asia. We are seeing big demand from China, Japan, Australia and Indonesia. We tend to white label our services to brokers, who are on-boarding new users to our service.
Tell us a bit more about the deal with Gallant. Are you keeping the brand and what were the main server locations that you acquired from the acquisition?
The deal was signed a month ago, we tried to keep it under wraps for as long as possible however we did notify our larger clients about it. We now have around 10, 000 active virtual machines in our portfolio. We have presence in the Equinix NY4 datacenter in New York, LD4 in London and we are a couple of weeks away from opening in LD5. With Gallant we now have more locations in Tokyo and Singapore, as well as Amsterdam and Frankfurt, however the two major FX Liquidity venues - New York and London, are where the majority of our infrastructure resides.
Do you have plans to do more acquisitions in the near future?
All I can say at this point in time is that we are looking for more deals in the near term.
