In our previous article we discussed how important changing consumer behaviour and customer experience is in today’s ever-changing marketplace.
Continuing the conversation, we would like to touch on the importance of disruptive industry products that can enhance the Lifetime Value (LTV) of clients and increase customer satisfaction.
Disruptive solutions in technology are commonly driven by customers. If we take a moment to look at the financial industry, we realize that the technological evolution has developed in response to the needs and wants of customers.
This is a cross industry discipline that applies to almost all businesses out there.
Therefore, deciding to focus on technology is effectively responding to customer needs and enhancing their lifetime value.
In this discussion we look to David Sypher, VP of Product at Trading Central, to better understand the opportunities and challenges disruptive technology, such as the products offered by Trading Central, bring to an ever changing industry.
Hi David, and thank you for joining us today. Given that we have admittedly moved into a new era for all online businesses and specifically financial services, the tools traders are employing to trade seem to be front and center stage. Why do you think that is?
Yes, there seems to be an industry back-shift to active trading fueled by the ‘work from home’ movement which is allowing new and seasoned traders to invest the time they would have usually been travelling, into trading their investment portfolio.
The tools they use are of critical importance which can dramatically contribute to their trading success.
For instance, alternative data Analytics have, in many cases, now become mainstream and information such as the historical volatility analysis, which we offer in our Economic Insight product, allows the trader to align a probability of movements in a Forex pair to economic releases.
This is a new and powerful data point to help the trader capitalize on volatility or simply manage their trading risk.
In a fast paced industry, such as the financial services industry, traders need to be able to respond quickly. What are the essential tools a trader should have in their ‘weapons arsenal’?
The chart has become the center of the universe for the trader. Data visualization in real-time allows the trader to see trends, patterns, indicators, economic events, etc. and instantaneously assess the impact on an instrument.
Essentially, the decision to buy or sell can be made in seconds resulting in profitable decisions.
Given your position in the company as VP of Product and that Trading Central is considered to be one of the pioneers in the FinTech industry, we would like to grasp the opportunity and get some insights on the product development process.
Two decisions were made early on that have been the core enablers of our success - choosing to use Agile software development methodology in everything that we do and secondly building our products as SAAS, allowing us to have one code base with deep customization capabilities.
Yet, in today’s competitive product world, whether you are a FinTech provider or creating disruptive tech in some other industry, the secret sauce is in how you define the problems you are solving and for whom you are solving them.
This is really where the product processes kick-in and I can say that we are lucky to have access to hundreds of Brokers and Banks globally within our client list to answer these questions and therefore make the right product decisions better than most.
What do you think is most important, listening to the needs of traders, brokers or both?
Brokers have the opportunity to spend their business hours around traders and they are passionate about understanding these key customer’s needs.
Yet, while there is a great depth of knowledge in the problems that need to be solved within the brokers, there can also be biases and speaking to traders directly is important to filter and refine the true needs.
We would like to touch on Trading Central’s Economic Insight product? Could you please elaborate on the importance of the product and how it disrupts classic products?
Until recently, economic events were considered to be an alternative data set.
Using Economic Insight a trader can now be up to date on all the economic releases, easily check the historical volatility, visualize the impact on any Forex pair in intervals from 5 minutes to 4 hours after the event and can then use this information to set their take profit and stop loss levels based on their risk reward trading plan.
Classic Economic Calendar products simply provide the event data without analyzing the impact. Facilitating the trade preparation is what differentiates our product in the market.
Why is it important (as a broker) to adapt your product offering to the needs of your traders and continuously add new products in your offering to traders?
Traders are not a homogenous group. What I mean is their knowledge level, desire to learn and be challenged, and their trading goals and methods can be drastically different.
Let’s take desire to learn as an example, there are traders that are excited and stimulated to learn about complex options yet there are others who may just be active and want to have the analytics done for them.
You can see that the tools we might provide a trader with would be significantly different for these two user groups and the broker would be best advised to understand these differences and adapt their product offering accordingly.
Additionally, new products are critical for the life cycle of the trader.
Providing new ways for them to be successful and engaged, given no trading strategy will work forever, is essential to the success of the trader and the broker.
What drives innovation within TC?
Solving client and user problems is at the heart of our passion for innovation and it doesn’t happen without passionate people.
We strive to understand success in the eyes of the user and the client (ie: the broker) and to find solutions that can be built with an amazing and engaging user interface, yet are easily deployed by the broker.
Specifically, our TC Labs unit is employed with highly skilled data scientists, quantitative analysts and developers whose main job is to experiment and find solutions that the rest of the organization can implement.
What should we expect from TC over the next few years?
You can expect to see great things from us in the next few years! While we are currently strengthening our offering to better deliver on our ‘one stop shop of analytics’ mission, next in line will be tackling or should I say inventing new verticals beyond the more traditional Technical, Fundamental, News and Sentiment and Economic categories in an effort to empower the trader to make better investment decisions through innovation.
From our discussion above, it is clearer than ever that technology is a customer-driven phenomenon. Technology evolves continuously as new tools and products come and go whilst customers choose which ones to adopt.
Therefore it is no longer about having access to better or more groundbreaking technologies, as nowadays there seems to be an abundance of disruptive tools available to meet the needs of traders.
It's about focusing on the implementation and delivery of what clients need faster and with more accuracy through partnerships with industry leaders such as Trading Central.
This is what drives market share to change hands in shorter time frames. In other words don’t be a follower, drive disruption by listening to your customer needs.
