Most offshore brokers have a poor to average product, low traffic, and probably don’t make a crazy amount of money.
There are a small number of firms that buck this trend. They are unique in having a large customer base, good product, but also an anonymous ownership structure.
In this new short series we look at these firms, what they do, and how they do it.
First up – PrimeXBT.
What is PrimeXBT?
PrimeXBT offers crypto futures, physical crypto, and CFDs. It is owned by a company registered in the Seychelles, with crypto futures and CFDs offered via an entity in St Lucia. Physical crypto is offered via a partnership with a company based in Lithuania.
Who is the actual owner? The Seychelles allows for anonymised company registration. This means it’s almost impossible to know who the true owner of the company is.
However, it seems like PrimeXBT has close ties to a company called Finyard. This is a software development company based in Cyprus. Software development companies operating under the Cypriot ‘IP Box’ regime are subject to a lower level of corporation tax of 2.5% tax.
People listed as PrimeXBT employees on the broker’s website have their employer set to Finyard on LinkedIn. Finyard says it was set up in 2018, even though it was only registered in 2023. But PrimeXBT was launched in 2018.
PrimeXBT also makes extensive use of Covesting, which is a cryptocurrency and crypto software company. The people that set up Finyard also set up Covesting. Covesting also had an ICO in 2017 that raised close to $20m. PrimeXBT was launched the following year.
Again, this doesn’t mean for sure that Finyard is the owner of PrimeXTB but it certainly looks like the companies have close ties.
The product
One of the most striking things about PrimeXBT is its product. The company recently rebranded both its app and website.
As noted, part of the reason PrimeXBT is an interesting company is because its product is…really good. Typically offshore firms use white labels and other off the shelf technology.
PrimeXBT has a partnership with DevExperts. I think I recognise DevExperts charting in the app, for example. However, they also have a lot of devs in house, so presumably some of the technology is theirs as well.
Whatever the case, their desktop website looks as good or better than many brokers, even those with a lot of money behind them. For instance, below is a screenshot of the PrimeXBT desktop homepage…
Note that the blue ‘CFD Trading’ text changes to show different text, reflecting the different products they offer.
Now here is the eToro homepage…
….And then Trading 212’s
PrimeXBT looks as good or better to me.
My hunch is that they are taking inspo from Revolut, whose homepage looks like this…
I suppose aesthetic preferences are subjective but to me the movement today is towards simplicity. This is what Plus500’s Chief Product Officer has said. It’s what the XTB CEO told us clients want recently. It’s basically what all fintech apps have attempted to do over the past few years. And even if you don’t like PrimeXTB operationally, you can’t fault them on this front.
The same is true of the app the company offers. Here is the first page you land on after signing in on the PrimeXBT app.
And then here is the first page you land on when logging into your IG spread bet account on the IG app…
You can fault the PrimeXBT one maybe because they’ve clipped off the pictures on the product options, which looks a tiny bit off. It would also look better in light mode in my opinion. Otherwise it’s clear, easy to use, and looks good. The IG one is less intuitive to me. For example, I never set up a watch list but there is loads of stuff on that tab when I log in. There is also no central ‘home’ area from which you can oversee your account and trading activity. IG is making a new investment app so presumably this will change a lot when that’s live.
Regardless, the point is not to dunk on other companies here. It’s more to highlight the fact that PrimeXBT has built an app that looks good and is easy to use. It is primarily the major players in this industry that are trying to do the same, so it’s remarkable that a completely offshore company, where we don’t even know who the true owners are, has already built one.
How did PrimeXTB get so big?
If you look at the screenshot of the homepage above, you’ll notice that PrimeXBT claims to have over a million registered users. This is a lot! TradeInfomer also understands that the broker is doing over $500m in daily trading volume, so presumably those registered users are actually trading as well.
How they did this is also interesting. My view is that somehow the fact they offer physical crypto helped them get through ad bans for offshore CFD brokers.
Another option is that they simply figured out a way to get through ad blocks and were happy to be aggressive about it. Either way, I remember they used to advertise very aggressively on YouTube and via Google ads a couple of years ago. Maybe this is how they got started.
They also worked with Dirk Hartig, who worked at BDSwiss and a couple of other brokers. From memory, they used him as something akin to an influencer in some of their past ads. He also acted like the ‘host’ of their YouTube channel, which has almost 50k subs. Interestingly they just started a new channel, which seems to be part of the wider rebranding effort.
Supporting the whole ‘using crypto as a way to indirectly market themselves’ narrative is the fact that pretty much every affiliate they have on YouTube – and they have a lot – is a crypto one. For example…
This is also true on Instagram, where every person I’ve found shilling PrimeXBT as an affiliate is selling the crypto product.
The same holds true of their organic efforts. The broker seems to do AI content to rank in Google, with 23 articles published on June 13th. Only five of those were non-crypto related and focused instead on either indices or commodities (oil, natural gas, gold). This seems to actually work as they are currently ranking on page one for ‘X price prediction’ for a few asset classes, including gold.
Then you have relationships with a few of the review websites. Again, the focus a lot of the time is on crypto. For example, ADVFN recently named PrimeXBT as ‘Best Cryptocurrency Broker 2024’ and wrote up their rebrand.
When you write about marking strategies, as we’ve seen before looking at XM and XTB, it can be hard for a couple of reasons. One is that people seem to expect a kind of secret sauce that explains a company’s success, which usually doesn’t exist. Secondly, and as should be clear from above, every firm uses lots of different marketing strategies to onboard clients. Capturing the entire gamut of a company’s marketing efforts is thus not an easy thing to do.
The key point for me is that, whatever avenue they take, PrimeXBT continues to heavily target crypto products. Whether that works as a cross selling tool is impossible to know from the outside. However, given they continue to do it – and physical crypto isn’t typically a huge money maker – there is a good chance it does.
PrimeXBT expansion
The final point that is worth highlighting about PrimeXBT is that they seem to be moving towards expansion and greater transparency.
If we make the assumption that Finyard and the broker are connected, then in the last 12 months or so, the former has hired…
- XM’s former Chief Marketing Officer
- The former Head of Affiliates at Exness
- Senior product execs from FxPro, Exness, XM, and Exinity
- Tech people who have experience at Yandex, Revolut, Alpari, and Tinkoff (big Russian fintech)
PrimeXTB itself has hired…
- Affiliate managers from Exness and Capital.com
- Dealing guy from Exness
The interesting question now is whether they’ll continue to just stay offshore and do the same sort of thing as Exness, XM, and the other brokers who primarily target emerging markets. Or if they’ll get a tier-1 license and target clients with it.
Finyard is currently hiring customer service and retention managers that speak Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai, Portuguese, and Spanish. Or in other words all countries that you target offshore. So probably PrimeXBT is going down the XM / Exness route.
