Retail brokerage group eToro has quietly opened a new office in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.
One of the company’s local recruitment partners posted a picture of the new office online on Friday.
The broker does not appear to ‘officially’ acknowledge the office, at least at the moment, as there are no job listings on its own website for the office.
However, LinkedIn data suggests the retail broker now has a team of about 30 people working in Georgia. These are almost all people working on the broker’s technology team.
eToro appears to have entered the country via a partnership with Webiz. Like eToro, Webiz is an Israeli company and it provides outsourcing to technology firms. In simple terms, Webiz hires tech workers in Georgia and then contracts them out to other companies.
The obvious benefit here is that eToro gets much cheaper labour for an area of its business that is notoriously expensive. Most of the broker’s tech team appears to be in Israel. But a software engineer, even if they are not hugely experienced, can easily cost $13,000 per month if they are based in Tel Aviv.
Georgia has also become a bigger hub for tech outsourcing, particularly since the start of the war in Ukraine. Proximity, and the fact you can stay in the country for a year without a visa, means many people have fled to the country since February 2022.
Other companies have also opened offices in the countries in the last 18 months or so. Technology firms Devexperts and B2Broker, for example, both have a sizeable presence in Tiblisi, with most employees there seemingly in tech roles.
Some brokers also have a presence or just a corporate entity in Georgia. For example, OctaFX has some employees based in the country and FXPig has a corporate entity registered in the country, although it does not appear to have a physical presence.
