Centroid Solutions

CRISTIAN VLASCEANU

CEO of Centroid Solutions

Q Hello Cristian, congratulations on your new role at Centroid Solutions. What attracted you to take the reins at Centroid Solutions?

Thank you, Paul, for the wishes and invitation. As you know, I have spent my entire professional career in this space, and I understand what are the requirements and needs from brokers - and I have solved numerous challenges for them in the previous roles I held. With Centroid Solutions, I was impressed to see the scope and depth of the offering, with products that not just cover some major technology gaps in the market but introduce new powerful concepts by merging risk management together with smart execution capabilities, which significantly helps brokers improve their bottom line. The products are suitable for brokers of different sizes, adapting to various business strategies and execution models, while providing the required technical assistance to scale up their businesses.

Additionally, I am pleased to say that the founders of Centroid Solutions and I share the same vision and plans, committed to a focus on continuously improving our technology, innovating and providing excellent customer services to our clients.

Q Can you further elaborate how is Centroid Solutions offering different than other providers?

Centroid Solutions is a technology company specializing in risk management, quantitative analytics, connectivity, complex execution strategies and P&L optimization for financial brokers. The team is very experienced and possess unique talents and skills, being comprised of professionals with many years of hands-on experience in dealing desks, risk management, quantitative risk analytics, software development, trading solutions and infrastructure.

Our product offering is also very custom: our competition is either focusing on producing risk management information only, often not in real-time, and most importantly, completely disconnected from the actual trade execution process (meaning that the information cannot be used to construct execution rules, which would automatically detect and mitigate risks in real-time at the point of trade execution); or either focusing entirely on trade execution only, but again, such solutions are completely disconnected from the actual risk management process of the broker (meaning that, such systems also cannot be used to construct intelligent execution rules). This creates a handicap situation for brokers on multiple levels:

• prevents brokers to maximize their risk-adjusted

P&L results, because risks cannot be automatically detected and mitigated in real-time;

• causes business inefficiencies and higher overall operating costs;

• and prevents brokers from providing a consistent pricing and execution for their customers.

Therefore, what makes Centroid’s offering unique is the fact that we offer a technology suite which helps brokers to effectively overcome the above issues, by merging together real-time risk management and quantitative analytics, with the ability to construct sophisticated execution rules, to automatically detect and mitigate risks, on-the-fly, at execution level.

Q How do you see the brokerage space changing in the future and what developments are you making to adjust the product offering?

As we have seen over the last years, the brokerage space is constantly changing, at an increasingly faster pace, and becoming more and more challenging. Naturally, the brokers requirements on their technology stack are

always changing as well. Tough regulatory frameworks and high competition makes it increasingly difficult for brokers to sustain high profitability results, maintain loyal client base and increase clients’ engagement. All these business challenges demand more efficiency in operations, better risks visibility, and more advanced execution capabilities to help them achieve better consistency in pricing and execution quality for clients, and also higher risk-adjusted P&L results. Thus, brokers will have to rely more and more on technology, data and automation.

Our technology has been built from the beginning to tackle such issues, in a flexible way, allowing for any degree of customization. However, we are putting even more focus on the use of big-data analysis, to help brokers in understanding how their business works, by identifying issues that can lead to potential losses, while helping them define their desired risk profiles, business strategies and models that can help to forecast and eliminate potential risks.

Additionally, starting with last year, due to the increased volatility which brought more opportunities, the financial markets have seen an influx of traders and interest, leading to higher volumes of transactions and greater demand in terms of product offerings. Thus brokers have to respond quickly and meet the new requirements, expanding their offerings of financial and trading products, apart from just CFDs. We have foreseen this transition since before and are already strategically expanding our technology to cater for such needs, effectively evolving to a complete multi-asset fintech solution. We will be announcing some exciting new developments in this regard, towards the end of the year.

Q So, is it really possible for brokers to future proof their technology needs to some extent or will they continuously need to update at least some parts of their trading infrastructures and systems?

It is not really possible to future proof the technology needs of a broker, long-term. The brokerage business and related B2B FinTech industry are evolving rapidly compared to many other industries, and it is important for brokers to keep an open mind and stay informed about latest developments, to stay ahead and maintain an edge. Not very often, but from time to time, a new technology comes along that shakes the “status quo” introducing new functionalities or business capabilities, which significantly changes the way brokers operate their business for the better, either from costs, revenue, business opportunities perspective, or all of the above. At that point, brokers may discover that the current technologies they use are simply not allowing to take advantage of new capabilities that are out there. In this situation, and in most cases, it would be far easier and cheaper for a broker to switch to the new technology, rather than trying to patch up with quick updates to the current technology, which may not be even designed or architected to be fitted with such new technological capabilities.

Q What are your plans for this year and how are these proceeding so far?

In short, we have an aggressive expansion plan on all fronts, to cope with the growing demand. We have already scaled up the teams and are planning several new key hires, some of which will be announced shortly.

On the product side, Centroid’s products are already market leaders, but we are not stopping here. As mentioned before, we are always further developing our products and have very exciting functionality coming out this year:

• On the Risk Management System (RMS) side, we are working on the next big iteration, a complete overhaul of the system, effectively taking the system to another level, further focusing on big-data technology, with predictive analytics, and much more.

• On the Centroid Gateways Aggregator side, we have already rolled out several new features and in the near future, we are going to release many new improvements, including a deeper integration with our RMS, smart settings scheduler, synthetic products, complete support for multiasset trading, REST interfaces for web-based trading platforms, more and more integrations… to name a few.

Our team is also working on delivering a newly designed website that will showcase our unique solutions, illustrating key new concepts. Also, we will continue our contributions in the media and attend several expos and events this year, to present our products and to share our new developments and vision.

Q What is the usual sales process for your products and how can brokers contact you to find out more about your offering?

All our solutions are delivered bespoke and tailored to individual needs of each of our clients, so in terms of the process we first start by understanding the requirements of the customer, followed by an indepth walkthrough of our relevant solutions. Finally, our development and on-boarding teams will take over to build and deploy the products meeting the customer’s needs and provide assistance and training throughout the on-boarding process and ongoing afterwards. We can be reached via the usual channels, such as our website www.centroidsol.com or via email to sales@centroidsol.com.