Get your broker listed on TradingView with cTrader
Welcome back to this month’s edition of the C-Suite – a monthly interview where we speak to leading executives from the industry.
Recently Capital.com announced that it has plans to hire 300 engineers. Why are they doing that?
We spoke to the company’s Chief Product and Technology Officer Dana Massey to find out.
Stop getting arb’d, start using Centroid
Capital.com recently announced that they’re hiring 300 engineers – why?
The short version is that today we are just a CFD shop and, although we’re still growing and performing well as a business, the market is becoming much tougher and is consolidating. It’s becoming harder and harder to acquire users. So we need to do more than just sell CFDs to survive and we need a lot of engineering talent to support that effort.
What does that mean in practice?
I can’t reveal everything but what I can say is that we have a knock-out product set to go live in Europe next year. We also have a real stock trading product that we will be launching as well. We have 12 to 15 key products that we want to launch over the next two years, all within a single app. And we need a lot of developers to make that happen.
ATFX is on a hiring spree – read about it here
Is prop trading one of those products?
We don’t have plans to include prop trading to our product suite at present.
What I would say more broadly, is that we believe markets tend to consolidate over time. So if in the past you had 10 different apps for different products and services, over time those become unified in one app. For Capital.com to continue performing well, we need to have those things in one app.
Do you care where your new hires are based?
No, so long as they can work on our schedule. Obviously there are some regions we are not going to hire from. But if someone is in, for example, Sweden or France, and they are a good engineer, absolutely we will hire them. We already have some small hubs, not necessarily with technical employees, in places like Lithuania and Bulgaria. I can imagine those growing over time as well. If we ended up hiring lots of people in a given country, that could become a new hub for us too.
Get a Match-Trader server and start your brokerage business today
From the outside, the employee numbers you are looking for seem huge. If you look back two or three years ago, I think a lot of companies assumed market volatility would go on forever and hired a lot on the back of that. Obviously that didn’t happen and a lot of companies who did massive increases in headcount had to cut back. Are you not worried the same thing will happen?
You can never predict the future. What I can do is look at the balance sheet of the company today and see that we can afford to hire the people we want to hire. We’re not hiring beyond our means.
If we don’t hire today, it leads to us not competing and ultimately dying. Because if we don’t hire these people and don’t add these products, someone else will and they will beat us. So I would consider not hiring a bigger risk.
To go back to the product, why are you adding knock-outs?
It’s a popular product in Europe and we looked at what clients were asking for – this was one of the products. As a product person, I’d also say that this has not been built in a simple, intuitive way before, which is what we are going to do. So clients can understand the product in a more intuitive way and ultimately have better outcomes as well.
And on shares, what is the thinking behind that? If I look at the UK as one example, it’s a product that – to do well – requires a lot of work, often without much reward. It’s cumbersome to add and also regulations vary a lot between regions. Plus you have a lot of competition.
Shares are another product that customers ask for regularly and they also attract a much broader audience than CFDs do.
To your competitor point, we’ve historically done a very good job of creating experiences that customers like and enjoy. If you look at our app ratings, they are some of the highest on the different app stores. So I believe in our ability to make products that customers enjoy and like is a strong competitive edge.
It seems like there is a kind of split in this industry, where some people say clients want a simple UI and UX but then others will argue that makes you lose out on more experienced clients, who want the different nuts and bolts that make the UX/UI more complicated.
I think there is a difference between complexity and being advanced. You can have a simple product that still offers advanced features. You can make something advanced but if it’s also extremely complex to use, that is not a good product.
So I don’t think that trade off has to be there. What we try to do is make products that are accessible for every level of client. If you want something that’s cut back and doesn’t have lots of features, you can have that. Equally you can access a platform which has those more ‘serious’ trader features as well. I’d also add that a lot of experienced clients like a simple interface, they aren’t always looking for the sorts of features you think of with a more advanced platform.
To go back go to the new products – how do you roll these out across the very different regions you are active in?
As a product person, my goal is to build lots of different products that both fit in one experience but also work without any of them. Another way to think about that is almost like ‘plug and play’.
If one of our local CEOs says we want ‘product X’ on our platform, we can add it. If a different regional CEO says they don’t want it, we’ll remove it. Our goal is to add all of the products I mentioned previously but I also want local CEOs to be able to roll those out for their regions, as they see fit. We don’t want a one size fits all approach.
A problem providers have had with adding new products is that there can be something like a tension between CFDs, which are ultimately very profitable, and other products, which are not so profitable. How do you address that?
Capital.com needs to have a wider range of products to make sure we have the right products for the right clients. If you are new to trading, for example, the odds are that shares are going to be a much more appropriate product for you and also one that you are more interested in.
This also applies to marketing. If we have more products that gives our marketing team more tools and also the ability to put the right products in front of the right clients.
On the profitability point, we are not going to do a product that is not profitable on a standalone basis.
I recently spoke to someone hiring in Eastern Europe, who was complaining about rates going up for engineers. But then at the same time, I hear from people here in the UK and also over in the US, that the job market for engineers has become much tougher than say four or five years ago, when it felt companies were throwing themselves at developers. Do you have any sense of what’s going on here?
This is a hypothesis on my part but I think you are right, the Googles and Facebooks of the world have been shedding staff. At the same time, there has also been this big change since Covid. I think a lot of companies realised during the pandemic, ‘wait a minute, we can really hire someone in Latin America or Eastern Europe or wherever it might be, and they will be just as good as someone we hire here in the UK’.
And so that has pushed up salaries in those regions, even if they are still cheaper than they are in other parts of the world. I’m speculating, but from what I see there has been something like a balancing out between different parts of the world. I’m sure changes in the economy have been part of that as well, but I think the ability to hire people from basically anywhere you want has made it harder for engineers in countries like the US but then also pushed up wages in places like Eastern Europe.
Something I always find interesting is how products are shipped and rolled out. So if you look at Musk taking over X, you can dislike the changes in the site’s algorithm, but to me it’s very striking that he fired more than 80% of the workforce, and since then they have shipped many, many, more features than they had done, probably in the prior five, or even longer, years. If I look at our industry, Trading 212 does not have the largest dev team and yet they are arguably the most active in rolling out new products and features. My point being that having a lot of staff does not seem to result in rolling out good products quickly. How do you solve that problem?
You’ve described my biggest problem in life. So yes we want to hire 300 engineers but there is no point in doing that if we cannot absorb them and make a bunch of individuals into a team. That is the reason that we’ve combined product and tech into one function here.
We’ve done a good job of team building so far but if we grow like we want to, it’s going to be a very different proposition. It takes different skill sets, better systems, better processes, better incident management, better release management and so on.
Honestly, for the last few months and probably for the next year, most of my efforts will be focused on this. How we do designs, how we write specifications, testing everything – the process through which we do QA is incredibly important. A lot of our hiring is just QA. All of these parts need to come together so we function like a Swiss watch.
You have a background in video games. Is there any level of overlap in moving to this industry? Do you feel like there were lessons you took from there that were useful here, perhaps you were able to find something that other companies in this industry had not exploited in the same way?
It’s very different in the sense that you are dealing with people’s money. That changes so much. You have different standards, approaches, and other things that just wouldn’t be a problem if you were building a mobile game.
At the same time, the process of building software is what it is, right? You’re still building a team, still rolling out new features, still trying to market the product.
One thing I would say is that video game companies are exceptional at marketing because it is so competitive. There are hundreds of thousands of games released on mobile every month. I mean, imagine if that many brokers were coming to market every month. And when I say good at marketing, I mean in terms of how they monitor and administer the mathematical aspects of their marketing activity.
I think the way I’ve always looked at work is that if you move to a new place, you should be comfortable with a third of what you’re doing, bring something new to the company with another third, and then be learning in the final third. So when I joined Capital, yes I like to think there are things I brought with me, but I also had to learn a massive amount from my colleagues too.
If you look around this industry, there are lots of companies hiring and some of them give you great benefits. A couple of firms in Cyprus, for example, will give you a car, pay for your relocation, and so on. So why join Capital and not them?
The most exciting thing you can do in your career, in my opinion, is build new products and services. And the things we are working on are going out to millions of users every day. We also want to keep growing, keep doing new things, and never be content with where we are. So if you are interested in that kind of role, Capital.com is the place for you. There are a lot of jobs out there as an engineer that are just maintaining a system. That is never going to be the case here.
From a more practical point of view, we’re open to people anywhere, so long as they’ve got the talent. If you want to relocate and need a visa, we will help you relocate. We want the best and brightest people out there working for us.
I appreciate this is a very LinkedIn question but do you have some kind of ‘strong’ view on remote working? Do you want people in the office if they are in a country with one?
We encourage people to come in and, I think if you walk around, you’ll see we’ve made great office environments for people to work in. That’s true in London, in Cyprus, in Dubai, and everywhere else we have a team.
At the same time, I am not going to force someone to come in just for the sake of it. There is no point making someone commute for two hours, just so they can spend a day talking to people on slack. I appreciate people want more flexibility and that not everyone is the same. I work very well from the office. Lots of people are the opposite. That’s just the way it is.
At the same time, I do think some level of contact and interaction with others is important. So one thing we will do next Spring is fly the entire company to Dubai. This is something we used to do at King. And the goal is just to get to know each other a bit better. So there will be some workshops, meetings, and so on.
I get that a lot of people do just want to sit with their headphones on and get stuff done. But a break like this once a year is useful. We work something like 240 days per year. Taking three days out to have a beer and chat with people, makes people remember that they aren’t alone, that we are working on this big project together and we’re a team.