Albina Zhdanova. Tools For Brokers.

Tools For Brokers

ALBINA ZHDANOVA

Executive Officer of Tools For Brokers ®

Q Welcome back and thanks for featuring in another edition of Game Changers, what’s been happening to you in the past couple of months since you last appeared?

Hi Paul, it’s a pleasure for me to be back here. It’s the end of Q1 and there’ve been many changes across the industry and market in general. The biggest change for me personally – relocation to the new place to set-up an office. Since May, you can meet Tools For Brokers in London, UK. Our 5th office!

Q Oh, London, congratulations! There are many rumors how Brexit will impact financial industry and many companies are moving out of UK. Why did you decide to set up an office there?

Brexit of course causing a lot of trouble to businesses and with every day that comes, it’s becoming more and more difficult to predict what’s going to happen. However, there are agreements between FCA and MiFid, and FCA will be active in EU, if you have a representative office in any EU country. Even if it goes bad, I don’t see it as a risk for a company – we don’t do b2c. The reason for us to setup an office – it’s a high potential of the market, FCA so far is the top trusted regulator. London gives us access to the trends and market changes, as many HQ are will remain in London. It’s a place to be if you want to grow your business.

Q I see. Do you have any special product, offer for UK based brokers?

We noticed that UK-based companies are living in a different pace, which is not always faster – it takes them time to run the decision through few floors. And so far, that market proved to be one of the most demanding, in terms of the quality of the product, technical support knowledge and experience of the company. We can provide all that and a bit more. In general, I think we have a unique offer among our competitors, and that we can bring new type of software for brokers.

Q That’s intriguing. What is this unique offer?

Tools For Brokers so far is the only company that can provide you full-cycle plugin equipment and such experienced technical support. When clients are signing with us, they know they can trust us to 110%, whatever question they have – they will find an answer

at TFB. We also have big development team, that allows us to always stay up-to-date with market trends. We’ve been the first to automate new regulators requirements, such as negative balance protection and leverage reduction. We helped many brokers to adjust to the new rules.

Q But what do you consider as your main driving product? With those that I’ve heard, like Bridge and PAMM, you have very strong and well-established competitors, how are you planning to stand out of the crowd?

I would limit myself with three main points. 1 Flexibility. The biggest advantage of giving the market the new product – flexibility. Any software has its lifetime, when it’s becoming too difficult to add more functions and options, because the initial architecture was not supposed to handle it. If there’s a new demand from brokers – for us it’s easier to implement it, as the code is still fresh and flexible.

2. Experience. Unlike our competitors, for the last almost 10 years we covered very different aspects of Brokers business, thus we understand not only requirements to the execution with LPs, but the big pictures of brokers daily routines and obstacles.

3. Functionality. I put it the last but it’s not the least. All the bridges have pretty much the same functionality, all of us update the products with new abilities, all of us do research and listen feedback to improve the product. With the new FIX API we have several important updates that none of our competitors has. Everyone is welcome to our booth to know more.

Q I feel the energy in that answer, and in general I see that TFB team is super active now. What are the plans in Cyprus and your expectation from Cyprus expo?

Thank you! Yes, we’ve changed a lot and the relocation to Cyprus was a very good move. We have a very strong team based in Limassol and big plans for the office. The Q1 started amazingly for Cyprus, and Q2 looks even more promising. We also looking at the Middle East from here, which is a potential market too. About the Expo – we are excited and very much looking forward, we have few big updates on the products and we can’t wait to represent them to the audience. Many expect that it will be slower – but our focus is quality instead of quantity.

Albina Zhdanova Executive Officer at Tools For Brokers