#Democratizing Trading
This week we spoke with Ivan Gowan as part of the research into our forthcoming book on scaling a tech company. Ivan runs two businesses – Capital.com and Currency.com. While the two fintech businesses are fairly complementary, the regulated nature of financial services has meant that the companies need to be kept separate.
The most interesting insight to emerge from our discussion was the importance of aligning your business with the interests of your customers. Both of Ivan’s companies provide a trading platform for private individuals – in the case of Currency.com there is a strong focus on trading cryptocurrencies, while Capital.com is an AI powered trading platform giving access to over 2,000 markets.
What is clear to Ivan is that the more successful traders are on his platform, the more likely they are to continue. His incentives are neatly aligned with his end users. For this reason, Ivan’s companies provide educational content and personalized insights to help his customers succeed. Ivan wants the clients of these trading platforms to evolve better strategies, and to avoid the typical pitfalls of overconfidence and a generally over-emotional approach.
Trading Opportunities for Many
Another element of the vision for both companies is to open trading opportunities to those who do not have access to large amounts of capital. In keeping minimum trading volumes deliberately low, opportunities to trade are opened to those from different socio-economic backgrounds.
This approach has not only helped both platforms to attract more users, but has had a further positive consequence when it comes to talent attraction for both companies. A fintech that can demonstrate its capacity for social good has an edge on traditional financial services organisations. Younger generations of workers have higher expectations of the companies they work for in every sense, and they want their work to mean something. Organisations like Capital.com and Currency.com will have an edge over competitors by having a sense of mission that can energize potential hires.
You can find the 1st CEO interview we published here. We had interviewed the CEO of Azuri Technologies, Simon Bransfield-Garth, providing renewable energy to people in the African continent.
