PandaTS

THOMAS KAREKLAS

Vice President of Sales

Q It has been a turbulent couple of years both in markets and in the wider world. How do you see the prospects of the online trading industry going forward, specifically for CFD brokers?

It certainly has been turbulent, to say the least. I think our industry tends to benefit when market volatility is up. Of course, people were stuck at home, they had money to spend, this benefited online businesses across the board. How markets continue to fare now that the stimulus is being pulled back and the postlockdown growth isn’t as easy to sustain, is another story.

Specifically for our industry, though, things are indeed looking up, both from the perspective of brokers and technology providers such as ourselves. We’re seeing new markets continuing to develop. Dubai is a very exciting regulated jurisdiction, there’s a great deal of development going on over there. South Africa too, is quickly growing into a regional FX hub, and of course there’s tremendous potential for growth in Latin America. That’s probably the least developed of the three currently but the potential is there and the demographics are favourable.

Q How do you view the increased competition from other online trading venues from the perspective of CFD brokers?

I think it’s all part of that democratisation of trading that our industry has been pushing for the past couple of decades. I don’t really view it as competition because when you talk about rival trading venues you’re talking about crypto exchanges, zero commission stock brokers and so on. These are asset specific venues that all experience their own boom bust cycles.

Online FX has historically proven to be resilient to these bull and bear markets because it’s always been the place investors come to when stock portfolios are down and they need a source of alpha not available elsewhere.

But looking beyond the forex markets specifically, CFD brokers are asset agnostic, they can offer exposure to any asset with a price feed. And they’re still the easiest, most affordable, and flexible way to gain access to markets.

Q What about crypto as an asset class? Don’t you think interest in crypto assets poses a threat to FX brokers?

I wouldn’t say so, and for the same reasons I just stated. The on-exchange trading of spot crypto is a completely different animal to trading crypto CFDs . Let’s not forget that a healthy derivatives market is essential to the maturity of an asset class and FX brokers are perfectly positioned to offer that to both retail and institutional players. They’ve got the business models down, they’re experienced in managing highly leveraged trades at scale, technology providers such as Panda have been equipping them with the infrastructure to do that and much more. And, as I say, it’s still the easiest and most accessible form of trading.

Q Turning to Panda as a company, what trends are you currently identifying and what areas has the company been focused on?

There’s been a tremendous amount of development going on behind the scenes. On one front, we’ve been very interested in A.I developments and how they can be harnessed to introduce efficiencies to how brokers organise themselves internally that were previously impossible.

Our central approach here has been to create products that allow brokers to utilise the abundance of data they generate in their day to day operations, which is usually wasted because they don’t have the systems in place to store, analyse and make sense of that data.

So, following on from our Next Call A.I and Document Verification modules, we recently launched Call Control, a A.I powered call analysis module that helps brokerage management teams improve the quality of service provided by their call centre agents. It records calls and provides managers with hard data on how their agents handle customer calls. The system is also equipped to listen for customisable keywords, which opens up so many possibilities in the realms of market research, as well as measuring the performance of existing marketing initiatives.

On another front, due to popular demand, we’re currently in the process of modularising our flagship CRM product, which is really the brains behind much of Panda’s broader offering as it brings together all the different forms of brokerage intelligence and insight provided by our other products. As a standalone CRM product we feel it can more than hold its own against anything else that’s out there and so we feel it’s time to get it into as many brokerages as possible.

Q What other trends has Panda identified, and what other products or areas of trading are you currently interested in?

As a company we’re also very interested in how trading is changing. Technology evolves, assets come and go, regulatory practices develop, but we’re more interested in how the mindset is changing as one generation of retail traders hands the torch over to the next. I think the most obvious of these changes is that the younger generation of traders is much more community oriented. They’re social media natives, they’re immersed in other people’s thoughts from morning to night. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that this generation makes decisions much more collectively than previous ones, essentially outsourcing these things to their network.

That’s why we see social trading as much more than just a niche, or a simplified form of trading for beginners. We feel that brokers will all eventually add some form of social element to their offerings because it’s becoming clear to them that they need to replicate the stickiness of all the other apps competing for their clients’ attentions. It’s a complete no-brainer that making trading social provides those inputs that users enjoy. It directly translates to more time spent on the platform, as well as ticking all sorts of other boxes regarding how traders reach decisions and take actions. For these reasons we’re actively engaged in developing social trading as a software service that we can provide to our clients.

But we’re also finding other innovative solutions that replicate the way social trading helps traders make decisions for brokers not currently pursuing social trading as part of their roadmaps.

Q Could you provide our readers with some examples?

Aside from all the new developments our teams have been working on, we’ve also been integrating a number of third-party services that all of our brokers can have access to. So, for instance we have the TipRanks collaboration, where the clients of our brokers can enjoy the stock tips of an entire ecosystem of market experts with verifiable track records, as well as

stock market news and sentiment. This is the sort of integration that adds value to a broker’s existing stock CFD offering and introduces the sorts of social dynamics and stickiness characteristics that lead to more time spent on the platform, which inevitably leads to more trading activity. Currently this service has only been available via our web-based interface but it’s also about to be launched on the mobile apps.

Another important element to this is how brokerages maintain a line of communication with their clients, and how a sense of community can be created in how they craft their messaging as well as the manner in which they deliver it. It’s time to move on from sterile email blasts and so we’re also very pleased with another third-party integration we’ve completed with One Signal.

This integration opens up all sorts of interesting messaging possibilities for brokers that they can tailor to their needs. It essentially allows brokers who use Panda’s flagship CRM software to craft a messaging strategy that includes mobile and web-based push notifications, SMS, and in-app messaging, all in one place. Used correctly, it’s a really powerful tool for keeping clients engaged, up-to-date, as well as making them feel part of a community..

Q How do all these different products and services come together when deployed under one roof by a brokerage?

We have plenty of examples of this at Panda, because we’re in regular communication with many brokers that use our products almost exclusively. What we’re finding is that the industry has matured, there’s much more diversity of competition, and at this moment in time it’s all about the efficiencies that can be gained by having each and every brokerage team operating at peak performance. The A.I work we’ve been focused on, and will be continuing, is a direct response to this. Whether it be compliance and back office, sales and retention, or customer support. We’re introducing a generation of products geared to helping these teams outperform by giving them to-the-minute, actionable data to go on. And when you have a means of bringing all this intelligence together, which we do with Panda CRM, it becomes much easier for smaller, smarter teams to out-compete larger less efficient ones.

Q Does Panda have any other A.I related releases on the horizon?

We do actually, but I have to remain tight lipped at the moment because we’re not ready to announce the details. As a teaser I’ll say that we’re planning to bring the same kind of automated intelligence discussed above, to the world of sales scripts. More details to follow.