About the Client
The client is a fintech firm that offers a proprietary turnkey trading platform to brokerages and investment companies working with FX, CFDs, and cryptocurrencies. This platform is one of the most demanded white-label solutions in the financial industry, so the client strives to equip it with the most advanced features to stay ahead of the competition.
Business Challenge
The client’s business experienced continuous growth: its trading platform was in demand among prop trading firms and FX, CFD, and crypto brokers. As a result, hundreds of thousands of traders worldwide use white labels of the client’s trading platform.
However, through market analysis and user feedback, the client identified a charting component in their trading platform as a weakness. Users complained that there was no possibility to trade from the charts, change the chart timeframe, create layouts, save them for further use, and much more.
The client couldn’t afford to lose their market leadership, so they decided to replace the charting component with a new one.
The nature of the client’s business involved the following integration challenges:
- In the FX trading industry, prices are marked up and differ depending on user groups. So, the client’s platform had an intermediary stratum liaised between the end-user software and the market data feed.
- It was necessary to migrate users’ preferences and settings so that after the migration, users would see the exact drawings and indicators they had in their old charts.
It was also crucial for the client to have an opportunity to buy out the charting source code to keep 100% of the trading platform components in-house and avoid vendor lock-in.
Solution
As mentioned, the client conducted a market analysis and gathered requirements for the new charting library. According to their investigation, they started searching for a vendor with relevant expertise and successful cases. The client also evaluated vendors based on functionality, compatibility, support, and costs.
First, Devexperts’ charting library DXcharts made it to the shortlist of candidates for integration. Then, the client’s stakeholders, CTO and CPO, decided that DXcharts perfectly aligns with their goals and technology strategy.
DXcharts is a charting package for historical and real-time market data visualization across multiple asset classes. It comes with over 100 technical indicators (studies) and a wide selection of drawings and chart types for in-depth technical analysis. The trade-from-the-chart functionality, multiple charts layout, price scale configuration, custom aggregation (timeframe) presets, and other handy features accommodate different styles of trading.
Devexperts helped the client translate business requirements into technical specifications and made sure that the deployed configuration of DXcharts aligned with the client’s needs.
As DXcharts was to be integrated into an existing platform, it was crucial to create a system design that covered how it would integrate with the existing trading system, including market data feeds.
After creating the system design, Devexperts went on to implement DXcharts into the client’s trading platform. The implementation was followed by rigorous testing to ensure functionality, performance, and compatibility.
The deployment also included integration with the client’s market data feeds.
“Devexperts spent years developing the DXcharts library, which became a powerful instrument for trading and investment applications. DXcharts provides all the tools required for daily trading and comprehensive analysis. In terms of implementation, DXcharts is built for easy integration with third-party trading terminals and investment portals.”
— Andrey Shuvlenov, VP of Product Management, Devexperts
Usually, it takes a few days to integrate DXcharts into a trading app, but in this case, it took longer because of a migration process: the team wanted to smoothly transfer users by keeping their preferences intact, including such data as open charts, symbols, positioning, zoom, drawings, studies, etc.
After rolling out the new charting, Devexperts conducted training for the client. DXcharts also comes with a knowledge base, FAQs, and educational materials powered by ChatGPT, so end users can take advantage of them right inside the platform without the need to open additional apps and leave the trading environment.
“The comfort of the users was important for the migration. Our end users usually spend several hours a day working with the trading platform, using charts a significant portion of the time. In the past, when we occasionally lost users’ UI preferences and the UI reverted to its default state, we faced a surge of negative feedback. Given the importance of charting, we chose to treat their preferences as invaluable and ensured a smooth transition to a third-party charting library, although it required considerable engineering effort.”
— Alex, Lead Frontend Developer, the Client
Additionally, the solution incorporated a special bundle that acted as an intermediary between charts, the trading terminal, and the market data provider. It was essential to address the need to display different quotes according to user groups due to varying markup settings.
Results
The client replaced a charting solution in their proprietary trading platform to adhere to the best industry practices and stay ahead of the curve.
The newly introduced features are:
- Trading-from-the-chart functionality
- More drawings, studies, and advanced charting tools
- A widget to overview earnings, dividends, and splits
- An instrument comparison widget
- An ability to create custom studies with Devexperts’ proprietary programming language dxScript that doesn’t require any coding experience.
DXcharts has solved charting usability issues of the client’s trading platform, improved overall user experience, and stopped customer attrition. The client was able to implement missing charting features that kept them from further business growth.
The adaptation of end users of the client’s trading platform went smoothly due to a user-friendly and intuitive UI of DXcharts.
To escape possible vendor lock-in, the client requested to buy out DXcharts source code. Devexperts started its transition to the client’s development team.
“As we strive to broaden our user base and fortify our platform’s standing in the competitive landscape, it’s been crucial to find a charting partner that brings innovation and quality to the table. DXcharts has sophistication and adaptability that undoubtedly enhance the possibilities we can offer our clientele. I’d like to emphasize Devexperts’ support during the integration, which was complicated by our legacy issues, as well as additional requirements to preserve users’ data during the migration.”
— Jonathan, Product Director, the client.