For more than 20 years ViewTrade Securities and its sister company Orbis Systems, Inc, have worked with financial institutions, banks, broker-dealers and fintech firms worldwide to enable direct access to U.S. equity markets. Many of the Financial firms we work with have legacy systems and use our APIs and microservices applications to scale quickly without disruption to core processes. Some fintech firms have only a vision of a new application and come to us for help with a full design and build.
It goes without saying that responsible data handling and reliable and secure electronic trading tools are critically important when selecting or building a trading platform. Our experience in this space has taught us that when creating a technology solution to trade equities and options in U.S. markets—there are several additional key considerations that should not be overlooked.
5 Things to Consider When Building a Stock Trading Platform
1. Designing a custom digital onboarding experience
Is the account opening process you have built for new investors uncomfortable or uncomplicated? Does it take ten days or ten minutes for the new investor to complete? Does it efficiently accomplish what you need it to in terms of know your customer (KYC) requirements?
If your front-end looks generic and the process feels awkward and takes too long, your investors may quickly decide to shop around to find another app or platform they prefer to use. Customer experience can make a tremendous difference when you are trying to distinguish yourselves from your competitors. And capturing just the right information at the time of account opening adds efficiency from an operational standpoint.
2. Accommodating specific investor needs
Can the technology accommodate niche trading offerings such as a need for trading fractional shares of a stock, or specialized services for high-net-worth individuals such as Rule 10b5-1 Trading plans and stock loan? Is options trading an option? There are many decisions to be made when building a new platform or app or enhancing an existing app. You may want to consider creating an offering for niche markets as an opportunity for growth.
3. Integrating value added services
Research tools, data analytics, trend reporting, AI, machine learning. There are many tools that
trading platforms offer which can add value to investors. The key is ensuring the content is integrated so it is seamless and smooth to use. Logging into a separate system (even if there is no added cost) is going to create a bumpy ride for your customers and they may not want to go through the extra effort to use that extra offering.
Does the content help them in their day-to-day investing decisions? How do they evaluate what to buy, sell or hold? Having access to real-time market data, research tools and analytics that can be easily integrated into the platform can set your firm apart.
For example, one of our premier partners is TipRanks, a well-known service that aggregates data and provides the track record and measured performance of any professional analyst or financial blogger. Their analyst rankings are a premium offering that can easily be integrated for a seamless experience.
Investors typically seek information to make more informed decisions, so consider building that in for them.
4. Modernizing without disrupting
What does this mean? It means you can leverage APIs for various functions that can help you quickly add services to your customer’s experience without impacting core technology. If you have a legacy system built on monolithic architecture, it can be resource intensive to change and could have negative downstream impact on your customers. Leveraging APIs and microservices opens doors to new possibilities enabling you to make changes with no impact on the backend.
If you are thinking of creating a shiny new trading app or want to enhance your existing offering, we can share more about our white-labeled trading platforms, microservices, and library of APIs to integrate tools and services quickly and easily.
5. Streamlining middle- and back-office processing
Inefficient and manual, paper or spreadsheet-based processes can lead to additional work for your firm and errors that could impact you or your customers. When creating a trading platform or application work with reputable, well-established partners that have your interests in mind.
Leveraging technology such as compliance monitoring and risk management tools to streamline operations and automate processing can be a true strategic advantage. Connect with us to learn more about how we can work with your firm too.
