It has been a busy few months for eToro.
After raising a warchest of nearly $40 million and bringing on board several powerful investors including Russia’s Sberbank and China’s Ping An, and most recently Germany’s Commerzbank, eToro is getting set to put that money to work in expanding its global reach. A first step we recently reported on was opening a Russia office.
So what is next?
eToro has long been a leader in the use of social networking tools among multi-asset brokers, ranking far ahead of even the largest brokers in terms of Facebook and Twitter following, as well as being one of the only brokers to operate its own in-house social network, OpenBook. So we would certainly expect eToro’s strategy to revolve around social networking and trading.
LeapRate has learned that eToro is getting set to phase out OpenBook as a separate social trading brand, uniting it with its own. The ‘new eToro’ plans to combine the functionality of OpenBook with that of eToro, under one umbrella and with one unified platform / mobile app. The new eToro will also include expanded functionality such as risk scores for evaluating traders.
LeapRate has further learned that a number of limited invitations to test drive the new merged eToro / OpenBook platform have been sent out, to be activated when the pre-launch is ready, likely within the next few weeks (as per the graphic above).
The move is apparently being made before a major marketing push planned by eToro with its newly-raised funds, with the thinking being: Why bother spending time, effort and money building up and marketing two separate brands under the same roof?