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Last week I mentioned the fact that IG Group’s Japan entity was its fastest-growing in the last five years.
We spoke to IG’s Japan CEO – Tomoharu Furuichi – in the summer of last year and one of the interesting things about him is that he had no prior experience in CFDs before he joined the company.
I don’t want to embarrass Tomoharu and attribute that growth entirely to him but presumably he had something to do with it. This raises the interesting question of do you actually need to know anything about the nuances of this weird industry to be a good hire?
The success of new entrants to the market in the last 15 years would suggest it’s not always necessary.
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For example, Alon Gonen, the main founder and backer of Plus500, ran an online backgammon website and other gambling businesses before setting up the company. Given its subsequent success, that lack of experience does not seem like it was a hindrance to the firm’s growth.
On a smaller scale, there are plenty of firms that are hiring from outside of the industry and seem to be doing completely fine as well.
“95% of our hires come from outside the brokerage space,” Afterprime CEO Jeremy Kinstlinger told TradeInformer. “Our entire support team is made up of talented clients we’ve gotten to know through our Discord community. Employees often introduce family and friends to the team.
“We believe you can take anyone with aptitude, hunger, and shared DNA, train them up, and watch them grow—from small roles to becoming heads of trading operations, support or payments. Our preference is clear, we don’t hire from the industry.”
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Jeremy’s point about hunger and aptitude is one that I think also applies to this topic but in a different way.
Let’s say you get your first job and end up working in a marketing role at Burger King. You work there for ten years. Your entire career has been spent at a company where you have a huge budget and massive brand recognition.
If you then move to a small franchise, with five restaurants in one US state, are you going to be as amazing at your job as you were at Burger King?
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In this instance it seems like someone who has experience growing a business on a lower budget, even if they never sold burgers before, might end up doing a better job than you.
In my own experience, one of the best marketing people I ever worked with had zero prior experience in finance, but was very good at doing growth marketing. The skills were transferable.
“✨ An outside perspective often challenges the status quo and drives innovation, especially when hiring from fast-evolving industries like crypto, betting, or gambling,” said Juri Kartakov, Founder of recruitment firm FinWizard.
“This approach works particularly well for roles in marketing, product ownership and development, KYC, financial anti-fraud, compliance, and customer support – and it’s effective across all levels, even in executive leadership. Who could forget when Exness brought in Alfonso Cardalda, with a stellar 12-year career at PokerStars, to shake things up? A brilliant example of thinking outside the industry box! ????????”
Please note that Juri asked to keep in the emojis.
Anyway, the problem with this is that some stuff does require actual technical knowledge. For example, knowing how to use MetaTrader appears to be a whole skill unto itself, which is not that surprising given it has its own coding language.
You can see this more clearly in the prop space, where many firms have blown up, often due to a lack of technical and operational experience.
For example, one provider I spoke to a few months ago told me that they had onboarded a prop and then a few days later got complaints about client trading. It turned out the prop had not changed any default settings for trading conditions, meaning all of the swaps were wrong.
These kinds of things require hands-on knowledge, which is hard to find outside of the industry. As a consequence, it can be difficult to hire individuals with dealing skills or other operational know-how, which in turn pushes up their salaries.
The interesting thing about this is that some of these people only got their start because they were given training internally. That happened because, particularly in Cyprus 15 years ago, the industry was fairly new and so there was almost no one with prior experience, meaning firms were forced to give people training.
As the industry has grown over the last 10 to 15 years, that has stopped happening as much because people can now just go to another company to take a competitor’s employee.
“Back in 2014–2017, getting an entry level role was much easier,” Emma April, the Founder of industry recruitment firm Hunstart Consulting, told me.
“Many companies ran intensive, week-long FX training programs, and if you passed the final test, you were hired on the spot. During my time in HR, I helped set up these programs in companies because we needed talent fast. But as the industry grew, so did the competition, making it harder for newcomers to get a foot in the door.”
Could that come back? As Emma noted, technical roles often need to be filled quickly, which can make training hard.
Another problem is that firms are arguably looking for people who might have the skills to work at an HFT, market marker, or some other large financial services business or technology firm, where they will probably get paid way more.
So if you are a graduate trainee with, for example, a degree in physics from a good university, you will probably be more tempted to join a ‘mainstream’ financial services firm, rather than working out how to stop clients arb’ing you on MetaTrader.
On the other hand, Cyprus has fewer of these firms so there is less competition. Plus it arguably offers a better quality of life to someone who is working at one in London. For example, a former CFA holder maths nerd colleague of mine used to spend half the year working from Cyprus.
He liked it more than London and also his mum was there to cook him nice food. So if you are a company like XM and can match his pay or even come a bit close to it, maybe it would be a better option?
Whatever the case, to go back to the original question, the answer is broadly that someone in a marketing, commercial, or strategic role could do a good job without the experience. But someone in a more technical role would probably struggle.
At the same time, that is not to say that someone with no prior experience is guaranteed to be good.
To take inspiration from the Dude in the Big Lebowski, it’s like, kind of complicated man and what might work in one situation, might not be applicable in another.