Bloomberg and Tradable launching financial apps stores.
As the rest of the world goes mobile, and gets used to doing things online via specialized apps — everything from checking the weather, to avoiding traffic and playing poker — the financial trading world is finally catching up. We recently wrote about how, after several years of hype, mobile trading is making inroads in a serious way in the FX sector, with mobile trading now accounting for close to 20% of trades, up from just about 5% last year.
Now, apps are on the way.
From a business-plan point of view, there are often popping up copycats of Apple’s iTunes Apps Store model — where independent developers create apps, sell them via a common appstore, with the appstore owner getting a cut (usually about 30%) of revenue. The key, of course, is to create large enough of an audience to get developers to want to post apps on your platform.
And now financial trading, and FX in particular, is no exception. Bloomberg is looking to leverage its large following — more than 300,000 Bloomberg Terminals are in active use worldwide — by introducing an apps store of its own. Initially, there will be 50 apps ranging from technical analysis to visualization, news, equity screener, derivatives, portfolio and fixed income (and yes, there’s an “Angry Bonds” app available!). Similar to Apple, Bloomberg will be taking a 30% revenue cut. Thanks to our friends at singledealerplatforms.org for pointing this out to us.
In the startup world, new entrant Tradable is hoping that FX traders also want to supplement their online trading experience, by using best-of-breed apps for specific purposes — charting, news, market visualization…
For more on the global Forex industry see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.