About the Client
The client is a Southeast Asia bank and one of the leading integrated financial services providers in Asia. The bank has a global presence in 20+ countries, including the EU, the US, and Australia, with 2.5+ million users.
The client focuses on retail broking, institutional equities, derivatives, prime services, equity research, asset management, and online broking.
Business Challenge
All brokers in the region usually settle for a white-label solution from a particular platform provider. But this choice comes with certain limitations. For example, the product is standard, it doesn’t change looks. This diminishes the differences among competing financial firms.
This lack of UI customization prevented the client from upgrading their offering and making it stand out from the competitors. It also meant the client couldn’t achieve their goal of becoming the first broker to offer fractional trading in Asia and on the Singapore Stock Exchange. As a result, this created an issue for the client’s strategy to grow and thrive in their own way.
The white-label is also quite expensive because the client has to pay a commission for every trade executed on their mobile app. So they wanted to reduce this marginal cost.
Additionally, the client had accumulated a number of legacy systems with little to no support.
So they were looking for a partner that could deliver a flexible trading platform, where they could easily implement sophisticated features such as fractional trading or seamless and reliable back-office integration. This would give them the ability to adapt and optimize their solutions to stay ahead of the competition and keep up with changing user demands.
The client needed a partner with expertise in the stock brokerage field and strong engineering skills. The partner should also be able to offer licensable trading software that can replace the existing vendor. This journey led the client to Devexperts.
Solution
After estimating the project’s multi-stage scope, the Devexperts team proposed a two-step process:
- Creating a white-label DXtrade XT trading platform adapted to exchange trading. This step involved integration with a third party back-office solution known as Nova, which is the go-to back-office for many Asian brokers.
- Creating a custom market data gate that can work with the Singapore Exchange. This step onboarded dxFeed, (Devexperts’ market data subsidiary) to create a custom gate using Morningstar API. This gate was essential to the delivery.
The project completion dates were tight: only a few months separated the beginning of the project and the first trade on the Singapore Exchange. But the Devexperts team made it on time.
Then, six weeks after the first trade on the Singapore Exchange, the Devexperts teams gave the client their first fractional trade.
“The hardest part was the fractional trading part. On one hand, it required a multi-level risk management approach, and on the other, it needed significant technical skills to integrate the solution with the third-party back-office. Another challenge was adjusting our deployment practices and implementing a bespoke software delivery process. We needed to do that to comply with the client’s security and compliance prescriptions and pass their internal audits.”
— Mikhail, Head of Delivery Unit, Devexperts
Results
Within six months, the Devexperts team implemented and customized the DXtrade XT trading terminal. In close cooperation with dxFeed and the client, Devexperts adapted this terminal to fractional trading and integrated it into the third-party provider’s back-office.
The client received the trading terminal with a branded UI and an integrated flow of the Singapore Exchange market data from dxFeed.
“We greatly appreciate Devexperts’ effort to make the target production go live — which was a very important milestone to achieve. Our ultimate goal was to have the right technology partner to support our platform strategy of Scalability as a Service. Congratulations on hitting this very first and important milestone, with more to come! Kudos to Devexperts and dxFeed’s teams for making it happen!”
— Program Manager, the client