Game Changers issue 24

BAIANA KASHAEVA Regional Operational Director at Tools For Brokers

Baiana Kashaeva Regional Operational Director at Tools For Brokers

When I’m asked which is my favorite time of the year, I tell people that it’s autumn. It’s not just because I still consider the first of September as being the beginning of the year, but because I see it as the most important and productive season for numerous reasons.

The first and very obvious one is that people are coming back from summer holidays, and so their time is often devoted to internal changes and o

ptimization. And, of course, after a summer break people can be more enthusiastic and open to new ideas, and solving their problems with fresh innovation.

Autumn is the time when the TFB team work harder than ever on all fronts. Developers concentrate on new crafting new software; sales and client relationship managers collaborate with each other across all offices; we frequently run internal meetings to analyze incumbent business strategies of clients in order to improve our approach and to determine how we can enhance our solutions. Within the organization, our sales people set the direction of product development, which mainly happens at this time of the year.

Secondly, from my own experience over the past 6 years, I’ve discovered that if you don’t have proper settlements with prospects in Q4, you won’t be included in their agenda come the new year. It’s very rare that a company will change software provider right after the initial pitch. When we speak about such complex technology as bridge, that involves the interaction between not only several departments inside organization, but rather the cooperation of 2-3 counter-parties - it’s no longer about simply changing one product for another. It’s vital change, akin to a “heart surgery” for the business, and I doubt that key decision-makers are only likely to decide to proceed with such actions so quickly in case of emergency. This is why it’s so essential to start working on your pipeline now, rather than after the new year.

The third reason is that various industry events across Europe, Asia and the Middle East take place during the autumn, where I always have a fantastic time catching up on news and changes of partners and customers, as well as sharing our own news.

In October our team spent time in Dubai for a business trip, taking the time to also attend the local expo, which was the second time that we’d been there. It was great to see even more of our customers and partners in attendance this year!

In November we also attended the London Summit. Going to London is a breath of fresh air in itself, but the city also has such a vibrant energy about it that no matter where I come back to after it (to Russia or to Cyprus), I am always very inspired and motivated. I regard the London Summit as the key time and place to demonstrate what you’ve been doing and working on throughout the entire year.

I love telling TFB’s story at these events, and how exactly we’ve managed to bring our ideas to the industry, and the struggles we’ve had to overcome on our journey. From one perspective, getting innovative solutions to a market where you’ve been working for 10 years and have a certain reputation and a great number of customers, might seem an easy task, but it’s not as simple as it might be to capture potential customers’ attention. The reality is that established reputation can serve your best and worst interests simultaneously. And I can explain how.

For many years TFB was known as a plugin provider with the biggest products line in the market. Everyone knew that if you needed a tool or custom development, you’d better ask TFB directly, as in 99% of cases they have it ready-made or can develop it from scratch. Our global expansion initially started with profit gained from plugins and add-ons. And at the same time, vast, multilateral experience helped us to notice and understand new problems with which brokers have to deal on a daily basis.

That’s where our new ideas come from. All of our top products are developed with one main purpose - to solve the current problems of customers related to liquidity connection, aggregation and operational risk management.

The most widely-known issue when working with an aggregating engine is that you have to check on your positions in relation to several places, including platform and liquidity providers. Many companies still do this manually, transferring the data to excel files and making all calculations there. These actions are frequently repeated, and flagged a problem that we wanted to solve.

However, when we brought these new systems to the market we had to deal with our own established reputation as plugin provider. Customers see companies as able to provide just one sophisticated solution rather than many, and that multiple models can’t be mixed to the advantage of customers themselves.

Changes in overall perception can’t happen within a day, and when I look at the past few years, I see that a systematic approach, clear vision and will to stay adaptive, have been the key elements in the evolution of our business. We listen to our customers when they say that any feature is no longer convenient or necessary, or that they want their systems to work in one particular way. But instead of blind trust we spend a lot of time to get to the core of the issue, to find out the root of our customers’ problems.

We devote plenty of time to self-education, by recreating full action cycles actions and the daily operations of brokers’ staff who use our systems. This is the best way for us to figure out what problems need solving and where these problems are coming from.

It took us two years to change the questions asked us from “what are the tools you provide?” to “what was your strategy to compete with established brands?” (The answer to this is probably best saved for another discussion!) These are the questions that businesses of all sizes are asking us, and the answers to these have been key to our success!