Back at the start of May, yours truly visited Hong Kong. It’s a magical place, with tiny apartments, egg tarts, and endless swarms of people, all bustling around trying to get somewhere.
It’s also a key base for ATFX and their institutional brand ATFX Connect, so I went to the company’s office to meet Ivan Wong. Originally from Singapore, Wong is now based in Hong Kong and works as Managing Director of Institutional Business for ATFX Connect in APAC.
“When I joined at the start of 2025, I told [ATFX Chairman] Joe Li that we need something unique to really start pushing ATFX Connect in APAC,” Wong told me. “Because we are already in a very competitive market and to get your foot in the door you need to come up with something fresh that differentiates you.”
The product the company decided to really focus on is probably unsurprising, given its popularity in the local market – gold. However, the company built out an offering that was aimed at market participants in the physical space, rather than retail brokers.
The result is that ATFX Connect is now serving gold hedgers, like refineries and mining companies, in Hong Kong and other parts of the region. It’s a move that Wong believes has helped ATFX Connect do what it set out to achieve – getting a foot in the door.
“The next stage for us is to start pricing into banking desks and big trading venues,” Wong told me. “We’ve started really strongly and having that initial push into the gold market has paid off, for sure. The retail broker market is very important to us but when you are talking to large players in the commodities space or to FX desks at banks, we are now able to say to them, ‘look, we are already dealing with these large gold refiners’. It sends a different message than telling them we are helping FX/CFD brokers manage their flow.”
These sorts of players have always been interesting to me as well. The FX/CFD space is in some ways an easy market to target. Companies are typically regulated in a small number of jurisdictions, are public facing, and go to the same events. You may not win their business, but you can at least find them.
In contrast, the other players that could feasibly use a prime of prime’s services are much more dispersed and operationally opaque. You could be trading with a company looking to manage its emerging market currency exposure with NDFs or facing a small hedge fund that wants to trade commodities. Just finding these companies is harder as a result, let alone convincing them to partner with you. So how do Wong and ATFX Connect do it?
“It’s not impossible to find them, but I’d agree that it’s not as easy as other markets,” Wong said. “Myself and my colleagues have also been doing this for a long time, so we have existing partnerships that are helping us.
“I think the more interesting thing we’re seeing is that, firstly, we have this big book of retail business. So with gold hedgers, we can often offer something price wise that can be more interesting than what they’re seeing elsewhere. The other factor, and I think this is still something we need to look into more, is information leakage. If you are a hedge fund, for example, and you’re trading with some large-scale market makers, their models can end up hurting your returns. That is another area where I think a smaller prime-of-prime like us can offer something different.”
Of course, even if ATFX Connect is targeting these sorts of businesses, it still has a big focus on the FX/CFD market. APAC is a slightly strange region in the industry as it has some of the largest single markets in the world for CFD trading but there are often regulatory grey areas.
“We are obviously very cautious when navigating the local regulatory environments but that is also a problem that tends to be more impactful for retail clients,” Wong noted. “If I look at the broker space in APAC for the ATFX Connect business, yes, you have the big players that have a presence here and we want to work with them or already are. But these brokers are everywhere so that’s not too surprising.
“What I think is more exciting are some of the players we see in local markets. We are in talks right now with a new broker in ASEAN, for example, that I think will be a huge game changer in this industry. This is run by a young guy and what they are doing is so impressive. There are other opportunities in Cambodia as well, where we have a license. So yes there are the big, global forex brokers that we are working with and which people know, but a lot of what is exciting in APAC is happening on a local level.”
“Well,” I thought, as I ate an egg tart on the way out, “guess I’ll have to come back to APAC.” ATFX Cambodia office next? Let’s see what happens.
