There have been big changes in the trading platform world over the last few years.
One of the main players in the space is Devexperts and we caught up with Nick Mortimer, SVP Business Development at the firm to find out what the company has been up to in that time.
Nick will be a familiar face to many readers, with more than three decades of experience in the trading industry.
The CFD trading software development landscape is undoubtedly shifting and, as part of this, the challenge posed to the ‘monopoly’ has been a topic of much discussion. What are your thoughts on this?
The fact that the retail CFD market is long overdue a shake-up in its trading platforms is not really news to anyone. The retail trading platform segment has been somewhat stagnant for years.
At Devexperts we are intimately acquainted with the ways that brokers are forced to work around the existing offerings limitations, because quite often a big broker comes to us with the request to help them break free from chains imposed by the trading platform monopoly. We believe we’re in a position to do something about it.
We understand what works for brokers in the established offerings, what doesn’t, what they wish they could change but can’t, as well as their reasons for sticking with tried and tested solutions despite them starting to show their age.
The issue mentioned in my first question emerged from the prop firms space development. In your opinion, where is this all going?
Devexperts had much success with providing prop firms with trading software in 2024 and there is still a lot of appetite at the start of 2025. Although we are keeping a close eye on regulatory developments around prop firms, the belief is that, similar to the acquisition of Oanda by FTMO, prop firms will integrate themselves into regulated brokers and their product will be offered as an additional service.
A lot of start up players in the sector were used to going to market with a white label. That’s not a possibility for now. What are the workarounds?
Yeah, it is funny to read sometimes in dealer chat rooms announcements saying “I’ve got an MT4 white label for sale”. Imagine how ridiculous it is that a vendor has forced the industry to have to find such workarounds.
At the moment, I can assure brokers that this is something they no longer need to be doing. Instead, they need to trust in new, modern, solutions that challenge this hegemony. These alternative vendors offer modern UX and UI, have better technical support, because they care about their reputation, they also fight for every client, that’s why they won’t pull licenses without notice.
Right off the bat we started with the hype around prop firms rushing to migrate their clients to all possible trading platforms out there. Let’s come back to the roots and introduce Devexperts. You’ve been in the market for over 20 years, but not many companies know the company, why is that?
Devexperts is in somewhat of a unique position. In our twenty years or so as a vendor, we’ve built around 60 trading platforms from scratch for various brokerages and other financial institutions.
These are custom and unique platforms for big-name investment banks and brokers – in short, financial companies with stubborn compliance departments!
As you might guess, they are often reluctant to reveal the name of their vendor to their competitors and most of our relationships are under NDA as a result. This is why we don’t use our clients’ names as aggressively as other software development companies. We are, however, starting to get more recognition since the launch of our own flagship product – DXtrade, a SaaS platform for brokers of all kinds.
If we go to your website dx.trade, we’ll see that DXtrade is a unified name for three different platforms. What is the idea of having three different instances of DXtrade?
It’s easy – different platform names help us target different client groups. For example if a crypto broker enters the website they clearly see DXtrade Crypto as the product best suited to them and the one they should check out. Until relatively recently, we didn’t differentiate DXtrade between CFD and Crypto, we were providing it to both these groups.
But it turns out these are two very different audiences. For example, when a crypto startup broker sees CFD and FX in the website description, they get very confused thinking that we don’t understand them, and they have to explain that they came to us for real (i.e. spot trading). When it comes to our XT product (XT comes from eXchange Traded assets), the reason for this is that there are no other major multi-asset platforms on the market that we are aware of. We are proud to be providing this and wanted to ensure we differentiated it clearly.
Options for CFD traders are an obvious addition, but very few companies are adding them, why do you think that is?
There is demand from downstream clients wanting a comprehensive offering of CFDs, options, and futures. Although the complexity of options makes them more operationally intensive and not as cost-effective to clear as CFDs and futures, that demand is leading Devexperts to include all three products into our trading platforms.
Can you tell us about any interesting cases from the projects you’ve worked?
Of course. I will tell you about one on price estimation and costs. It can often seem to clients that we overprice, and we are perceived as offering an expensive service. In reality, our budget estimations should be even bigger.
There was a case when a broker approached us with a request to develop a custom mobile trading app for them. The case was very specific, unique, and they had some very special requirements, so our cost estimations were roughly one million USD; they were astounded and declined our offer. They came back exactly one year later admitting that our architects estimated everything correctly and were ready to sign up with us.
Before that they shared their story: they contracted another vendor which estimated the solution at 200,000 USD, with a delivery time of three months. Our broker found themselves spending over one million, and they still hadn’t received the app. This case proves that our estimations are accurate thanks to our experience and focus on financial software development, in order to avoid double-spending, come straight to Devexperts for a discovery project.
To get back to the brokerage space, do you see any other new trends or changes, in terms of what your clients are looking for?
Nowadays I see demand for automation that can help brokers save costs. My favorite example is personalization based on event sourcing, dialogues, and behavioral patterns that are possible to analyze. Engagement and retention can be improved based on this.
They can create an impression that the platform is kind of ‘listening’ and ‘feeling’ the trader, and natively adapts to them. The problem with benefiting from this is that most brokers work with off the shelf software and its analytics is limited. Serious companies collect data points from everywhere and increase LTV.
A lot of brokers at the moment are thinking about what products or services they can provide to drive more volume and business. Sitting at the backend as a tech firm, are there any things that you see which can help achieve this?
I see two opportunities and fields to explore. First, brokers are sitting on a huge amount of data which just gets dusty and doesn’t work to their advantage. For example, the conversations with their clients are not analyzed and not used to craft a personalized message to stimulate another trade, as I mentioned previously. So start collecting it and analyzing.
There are some cost-effective solutions for this. I modestly take the opportunity to mention Devexa, our AI-powered assistant which is integrated with any trading platform, as well as with all the main messengers (Telegram etc). She is powerful enough to do precise client profiling for personalized marketing campaigns and user settings.
The second item is about subscriptions. They can be for anything, e.g. premium content inside a trading platform which is also personalized. When you buy a platform its functionality is limited by what your vendor provides to you, but you should think of a trading platform as an Amazon website – offer users the opportunity to check out this or that widget or feed. The main difficulty for a user is to make a trading decision. In order to take off cognitive load for a user the broker can provide additional info to help them make their decision whilst inside the trading platform.
A good example of this sort of tool is Quiverquant.com, where users can follow congressman strategies. Of course it comes with a paid subscription. The easiest way is to allow payment from the user balance. It eliminates the need to go to another website, login there, make extra clicks and filling forms, and so on. The platform can be a content shop for the user. Off-the-shelf platforms can be limiting but a custom developed platform provides flexibility.