Stanislav Vaneev, the founder of an international forex company, Grand Capital, explained in a column for Finance Magnates, why in 2019 it is much easier for modern “cloud” brokers to launch and maintain business, then it was for forex entrepreneurs in far-away 2006.
Stanislav Vaneev founded Grand Capital in 2006 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, after several years of trading on his own. In 13 years, the company grew up to a holding that works in 190 countries and speaks 15 languages, offering clients the latest cutting-edge trading technologies.
Drawing from its decade-long experience in brokerage business and accumulated market analytics, Grand Capital extended its areas by opening an educational enterprise Grand School, fintech company UpTrader, Blockchain -escrow service for participants in the forex market and the crypto exchange Serenity. The expert in financial markets told Finance Magnates how to easily become a “cloud” broker.
I am often asked how brokers’ work has been changing due to the development of financial technology for the last 10 years. Every time I have a lot to say, as indeed new technologies have crucially modified work of both clients and brokerage firms.
On the one hand, steady development of financial technologies stimulates a broker to keep the energy up in a highly competitive market constantly following trends and increasing the quality of services.
On the other hand, business processes have been simplified so much that I almost envy modern forex companies.
IT-services and products can be outsourced, infrastructure can be built in cloud, and clients can be provided with limitless financial tools and investment services. As such, there is no need to hold a vast staff of IT-developers.
One should not reinvent the wheel – just choose an agency that will maintain your company and simply do your business.
When I was founding Grand Capital, everything was much more complicated. We created all the infrastructure on our own. The market was still being created in Russia, and lots of things happened by trial and error.
Brokerage business required deep knowledge – you had to go deep into both trading and IT-technology. A Forex broker is 80% IT-company, so someone should build all the infrastructure, provide clients with reliable and stable access to online trading on financial markets and understand how it all should work.
Such specialists were worth their weight in gold at the time. In Grand Capital most of them were growing together with the company – they were learning to handle processes by ear. That is why 10 years ago launching a broker cost 10 times more than now.
Today one can order a turnkey brokerage firm or even a crypto currency exchange. What one should do is just to turn to a specialized company and buy White Label MT4/MT5 and legal services for LTD registration, open a bank account, choose a CRM for clients and staff or order a turnkey crypto exchange with liquidity.
The launching process is much faster than a decade ago. The first client deposit can come to a new broker’s accounts already in 2 weeks.
Meanwhile, in 2019 there is no need to have considerable knowledge in this field. Many entrepreneurs coming to UpTrader are far from being experts in brokerage business or Cryptocurrencies .
And that is fine for a broker now. One just needs to get the hang of just two things: lead generation and sales. All the technically complicated stuff and legal issues with business maintenance can be entrusted to professionals.
However, to make it look easy today, someone should have faced difficulties yesterday. All those opportunities have been created for years by brokerage company employees, including the programmers’ team of Grand Capital.
Initially we were creating program solutions for ourselves. Thus, in 2015 IT startup UpTrader was founded. Today it is already a large independent company with a team of 30 professionals.
It provides SaaS solutions, technical support and other services for forex brokers from all over the world.
Let me demonstrate it on the example of our CRM. Initially, Grand Capital used a range of ready-to-use systems for businesses. Mostly all of them were visually unattractive with poorly worked out interfaces.
This fact became a crucial obstacle to mastering and effective usage of the program by our employees.
Eventually, it affected the speed of task execution, the quality of services for a client and consequently, the company income.
That is why we set our minds on creating a CRM that differs from everything we worked with before. We accumulated all the deficiencies of the universal CRMs, analyzed the needs of both brokers and traders, and tested the smartest solutions in order to implement them in practice.
Initially in the frame of Grand Capital’s activity, and further under the UpTrader brand, we worked on our own system tailored to specific brokers’ activity.
This product created by our team along with our other solutions is unique in the market, as initially it was developed exclusively for the needs of Grand Capital.
It was designed to increase the speed of solving tasks and simplify the mastering of the program by employees. Presently, UpTrader CRM includes trader's room, back-office interface for the staff of the company, and the administrator's office section with flexible settings of access levels and available features for staff and customers.
As a result of numerous modifications and upgrades, we created a functional system that is already used by dozens of other brokerage firms.
Many of them highlight the CRM’s intuitive design, easiness, visual attractiveness and of course the functionality.
For instance, tons of payment solutions allow attracting clients from anywhere in the world, the partnership program contributes to the growth of the business, flexible settings of operational work increase clients’ satisfaction and speed of task execution by a broker’s staff.
I know that the UpTrader team regularly releases updates enriching the system with new functions and capabilities.
Referring to brokers in 2006, at that time we had to create many solutions from scratch for our own objectives. To some extent I even regret that I created a brokerage business not now, but 13 years ago.
Otherwise I would have come to a set table. On the other hand, though the work on solving brokers’ problems was complicated, long, and expensive, I am glad that we made it all the way to direct brokers literally to clouds.
