LeapRate Exclusive Interview… Sylwester Jezierski, marketing manager of X Open Hub, sat down with us to discuss changes in the industry, further improvement in the company and the recent frenzy around the post pandemic landscape of the financial industry.
LR: Hi Sylwester and thank you for joining LeapRate today! Last time X Open Hub was LeapRate’s guest (that was back in March 2020), we discussed trader’s demands and Brexit. What has changed in the company since then?
Sylwester Jezierski
Sylwester: As the waters begin to clear following the Brexit transition period, the repercussions for financial services firms are beginning to crystallize. However, over the past year, public opinion has focused mainly on the impact of the pandemic, which highly influenced the global economy and the world of financial markets. During this time, our capital group has seen immense growth. Currently, we employ over 500 people, with over 150 specialists working in the IT department. We have also managed to enter many new foreign markets, and we are now a more mature and larger company compared to the beginning of 2020.
LR: How has X Open Hub been managing through this challenging period of global uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic?
Sylwester: In many ways, 2020/2021 has been a period fraught with challenges and opportunities, difficulties, and developments. The quarantine introduced due to the COVID-19 pandemic changed the functioning of many companies at a rapid pace. Mainly because a lot of organizations have made the abrupt shift to working from home. However, I think that it is worth looking at remote work not as a hindrance but above all as a great opportunity.
Our trading environment has always been fully cloud-based, which means that our front-end and back-office systems have not been interrupted, despite our global teams shifting to remote work. We have had opportunities to test-drive new management and business processes and our agility to unpredicted changes.
From the marketing perspective, it was and still is a very challenging time. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we participated in many international financial fairs in London, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, where we were promoting our services and building a network of business contacts. Currently, most of the fairs have taken a virtual form, where we keep in touch with potential clients thanks to chats, video presentations, and webinars. We also heavily invested in online campaigns, thanks to which we managed to acquire new customers and partners despite the pandemic. We are especially proud of the trust that consecutive institutional partners from the banking sector pose in us. Lastly, we also have revamped our proposal, brochures and soon we will deploy our new website.
LR: 2020 was a very turbulent year, what do you think has changed in the retail trading industry? Where do we stand in 2021?
Sylwester: So, in times of extremely high market volatility and equally high trading volumes like what we saw in 2020, the need for serious risk management and seamless executions becomes particularly critical. It has driven a big infrastructure investment in our company and in other financial technology providers.
The introduction of zero commission share trading, understandably, have also driven up trading volumes and helped brokers to engage with a new class of retail investors. The “Covid boom” on most markets, not only equity markets, resulted in the interest in financial markets among investors, which was not recorded since 2005-2006.
All this means that the next part of the year will be full of challenges and many opportunities. I look to the future with optimism, and I hope that the wave of post-covid optimism will stay with us for longer.
LR: What can you tell us about your white label offer?
Sylwester: X Open Hub is the innovative and trusted institutional partner for trading technology needs, whether you are a startup, broker or an established bank. For more than twelve years, X Open Hub has developed one of the best user-friendly and equipped trading solutions on the market.
Our powerful white label platforms are optimized to deliver high performance, reliability, and are equipped with an immense number of features allowing traders to stick to the platform and our partners’ brands. That includes built-in economics news and calendar, heat maps, advanced market watch, market sentiment, trader’s talk, trading history, education module where clients can place their own videos and comprehensive statistics.
We offer all of that at flexible pricing packages – starting from 1000 $ USD per month.
We have introduced vast branding capabilities of our top notched mobile platforms both for Android and iOS users. We are offering placing clients’ fully branded applications in their own stores including Google Play and Appstore.
We are also putting a great effort on constant development of our environment. Whatever great feature we roll out, it becomes available to all brokers instantly and nobody is left behind.
In addition to our white label platforms, we offer a deep institutional liquidity on 4500+ global instruments, including forex, indices, commodities, shares, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies. Our multi-asset liquidity comes equipped with advanced capabilities and features, helping to maximize product offering. Our tailored agreements include spreads rebates and flexible profit sharing models.
However, the most frequently chosen option by our clients is the full package – trading platforms and liquidity.
LR: Any new company offerings you want to share with us?
Sylwester: If it comes to X Open Hub’s liquidity solution, we are consequently upgrading our servers in terms of software and hardware in Frankfurt, London, and Hong Kong to improve the execution, quality and accuracy of quotes. We are also putting a solid effort into APIs development to stream our liquidity to almost any FIX protocol compliant bridge or trading platform on the market.
Our company has introduced a new wave of measures aimed at improving our already robust offering. That includes new and lower spreads on the most popular assets as well as further offering improvements. Our liquidity coverage has spanned multiple markets, having expanded to over 4500 instruments.
It’s also worth mentioning that our capital group managed to obtain a new DIFC license in Dubai, which is a big milestone on the MENA market.
We also have profoundly improved our trading platforms in terms of usability. We enhanced our desktop and mobile platforms by introducing an immense number of new functions and features.
The XOH Mobile platform has been equipped with new icons representing each of the instruments; we have further enriched tabs associated with the most traded assets on the market and improved the overall user experience. From the business perspective, we implemented many new languages and improved even further efficiency of the platform. As mentioned before, we are one of the few companies offering a full branded white-label platform experience, including your own mobile apps in your own stores.
Experienced writer and journalist, working in the global online trading sector, Steffy is the Editor of LeapRate. She has previous experience as a copywriter and has been with the company since January 2020. Steffy has a British and American Studies degree from St. Kliment Ochridski University in Sofia.
