8 Demands Traders Have for their Brokers

Devexperts builds trading platforms for different brokerages servicing over six-million traders worldwide. Over the past fifteen years, we have gained insight into what traders look for in a broker’s platform. Here are eight of the demands traders have that brokerages should be listening to, and how to meet them.

1. Anticipate your trader’s needs by being prepared

If you want to attract new users and increase trade volume, never forget the basics: reliability, instant utility, and speed. The effort you put into these things today will still be paying off dividends for your traders, years down the road. The first step should always be to check if your technology makes it past these filters, and then go for hype points with features, tools, and functionalities.

2. Provide a feeling of accomplishment to improve onboarding  

Traders want “increasingly simpler sophistication”, which demands a lot of UI/UX effort. A trading platform isn’t a book, people are going to judge it by its cover. This means investing in intuitive designs and easy to use educational widgets for new traders. A platform should be navigable with a clean and well thought out design. This goes double for mobile interfaces since there are fewer options and users on mobile are often looking for a quick and specific item or action.

3. Be able to provide variety to attract more traders

Most big brokerage houses offer to trade Forex and contracts for difference (CFDs) on Futures, Stocks, Indices, Crypto-currencies. However, to be able to grow the volumes, a broker needs to quickly add and offer real asset classes; e.g. just offering CFDs on cryptocurrency is not enough due to spreads and the nature of CFDs, because it doesn’t allow to buy the actual currency, whereas there is an interest to purchasing and owning an asset. In addition, options to hedge FX/CFD positions could be appealing to the clients.

4. Pay attention to your trader’s needs

One of the most valuable things for the client is to be able to see data that is important for them in a quick and accessible way. There are people who, for example, don’t use charts for trading and focus more on volatility. At the same time, there are other traders interested in more in-depth analysis. Easier decision making means easier trades; easier trades mean more trades.

5. Be able to offer additional services

Brokers can offer additional services at additional prices. For example, educational programs, market insights, Level 2 data, social functions such as integrated chats, cloud watchlists, etc. Through features such as these, brokers will form strong relationships with long-term clients and successful traders.

6. Provide everything to unlock the full potential of technology

Everything has a bit of room for improvement. Innovation features sometimes come with complexity, though they need to be simplified to serve users better. This conflict of complexity and simplicity can be mitigated by an approach of unfolding complexity progressively at the right time and in the right context. This is best done via in-app walk-through widgets or contextual notifications that are triggered according to rules and events.

Innovation is essential in these areas: data analytics tools, UIs, mobile solutions, development of trading tools for wealthy sophisticated investors, mobile interfaces, cloud-based algorithm trading, and AI. Give traders a better way to see what is going on the market. Getting this information in time and in an easy manner will be a huge improvement to trader’s decision making. Having instruments, such as monitoring of unusual activity, new methods of data analysis, and educational tools.

7. Make your onboarding easy services accessible and easy to start using

The modern marketing toolbox does the job, tracking all traders’ activities from guest mode through account registration and first deposit, allowing you to apply business intelligence to the trading behavior and find hypotheses. To do this, you must run a series of A/B tests, tweak the interfaces, learn from this experimentation, and repeat. Repetition should help optimize the results. The easier the access to your services is, the more likely it is for traders to stay.

8. Integrate automated trading solutions

Nowadays, Machine Learning (ML) techniques can be seamed into automated trading solutions provided by 3rd parties and be used to analyze market conditions and recognize patterns.

When brokers integrate automated trading tools into their platforms, their traders are able to receive live signals from the market, or any other analytical info, straight to the trading terminal. This info includes macro indicators such as US Nonfarm payrolls or FOMC Meeting minutes, trading calendar, etc. More advanced traders can program models with the helps of ML to identify favorable market conditions to trade accordingly.

At the same time, these tools benefit brokers, who in turn can apply the same ML techniques and identify special marketing conditions to protect the business by adjusting spreads, applying last-look strategies for trades, and executing conditions automatically.

Conclusion

With the right risk management techniques and technology in place, brokers are able to successfully monetize their client base. Nowadays, brokers need to take a dynamic approach towards managing their clients while ensuring they still have an ideal user experience. Most brokers have now departed (or are departing) from a fixed A/B book model of risk management to better monetize their flow. Every dollar counts and technologies continue to change as competition increases across new and existing markets.