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Originally published on finextra

At UpTrader, we often come across forex brokers who struggle with stagnant sales growth. To address this challenge, they may try various approaches such as improving their software, adding new assets, changing their workforce, or seeking out new Forex CRM systems. While all of these strategies have their merit, let's explore some marketing advice that can be helpful beyond software solutions.

Stop chasing all the clients!

One of the initial steps to take is to assess whether you are segmenting your customers and tailoring your approaches to them accordingly. Establishing a precise understanding of your target audience will serve as the bedrock of your marketing strategy and sales team. It's plausible that your business solely focuses on one type of client, such as significant clients from Asia, managed PAMM account investments, or products and services for traders, investors, and clients with any deposit amount. Depending on your answer, your sales funnel may take on different forms - one funnel for each customer type or a single one. These funnels may differ significantly in tone, content of emails, products offered, services launched, marketing promotions, trading conditions, and sales methods. If your brokerage offers multiple products, you should classify clients into different categories, identify primary target audiences, and develop strategies for each group. Neglecting to segment customers can lead to indistinct advertising, ambiguous offers, and an excessive amount of website traffic. As a result, the client does not find anything for themselves and gravitates towards a competitor with a clearer offer. Separate funnels for different segments help increase the conversion of leads into customers and keep the customer with the

Narrow Your Target Market, then Expand

The following point builds upon the previous one. There is nothing inherently wrong with narrowing down your target market. In fact, doing so allows you to focus on what your team does best. By honing in on a specific audience, you can better understand their needs and tailor your products and services to meet their demands. This targeted approach requires effort and attention to detail, but it often results in a more efficient and effective marketing strategy.

Once you have successfully established a strong presence in your chosen market, you can then consider expanding to new regions or broadening your audience. This can involve developing new products or services that cater to a different demographic, or simply applying the knowledge and experience you have gained from working with your initial audience to a new market. By taking a measured and strategic approach to expansion, you can ensure that your business continues to grow while maintaining the high standards and personalized service that set you apart in the first place.

Choose a flagship product

This point is in line with the previous two and serves as a complement to them. When a customer selects your company over others, your main product should be apparent to them. What is your best product, and why is it your number one? From our experience, many brokers overlook highlighting their primary product, which is the showcase of their company. Instead, they offer an array of options, assuming that more options equate to better choices. While having several choices is advantageous, a potential client may become overwhelmed with the number of options and become indecisive. To make the decision-making process easier for the client, you should make the initial choice for them. After they select you, you can offer them much more. If you attract experienced traders who can make their own choices, ensure that you have a license because professionals are well aware of the consequences of non-compliance.

Conclusions: As a Forex CRM Provider, UpTrader constantly observes brokers struggling with building their marketing strategy. The most successful ones are those who follow the simple rules that have been described above. We believe that good marketing can make both companies and clients happier.

Payment system integration is quite routine for our company, we do it regularly. Despite the fact that UpTrader CRM already has more than 50 payment systems integrated, each new client always asks to add another one. This is not a problem, we have a process for it. However, a recent pattern has emerged that has caused significant delays in our cozy, well-honed integration process. Before, it took no more than 2 weeks, and now it can stretch up to 3 months. According to our observations, if a request to add the same payment comes from two different clients two weeks apart, then it will be difficult to integrate it. And here's why.

First, we have already added all the good payment systems: Appex, Skrill, B2BinPay, CoinBase, FasaPay, help2Pay, Neteller, Payeer, PayZa and so on. This means that when a request for a new one comes in, it will most likely be a small local company that will require a lot more of our attention because of their non-standard code or limited resources on their part. In addition, there is a high probability that no one except one or two customers will use it. 

Second, such payment systems often have incomplete API documentation, making the integration process very difficult. Written poorly by young developers, they require significant resources from our side to make them work, which may involve rewriting large sections of code to adapt to their non-standard API. 

Third, the payment system’s support team may take a long time to respond to our requests, because they receive a large number of simultaneous requests and do not have enough time to process them.

As we see it, this often happens when an advertising campaign is launched. A new payment system is released, and they want to quickly attract customers. An advertising campaign is launched offering lower than usual commissions, for example, 5%, and starting from a certain volume, 3%. Brokers respond to this ad. And since the campaign is held within a certain timeframe, the support team receives many requests simultaneously and simply cannot cope with the flow. As a result, the response time increases with each new request, since the resources of the support team are limited. Depending on the success of the campaign, the integration time can stretch up to 3 months. Clients don't see the other side of the equation and get nervous that a profitable payment system cannot be launched.

Another option is also possible, a much simpler and more likely one:

A new payment system emerges, not requiring any KYC compliance or with very low KYC standards. Brokers start plugging in because no one wants to comply with KYC. Everyone wants to connect this payment system as quickly as possible, which again leads to a technical support collapse on the side of the payment system itself, because it is often poorly developed as well. All in all, after all the fuss and agonizing waiting times, we consider it a good result if it does not close after 2-3 months. It is much more frustrating, however, if it does and then all that effort is wasted.

A few tips

If the ad campaign is super profitable, be prepared to save money but lose time. Apart from you, many companies responded to the campaign, which means that the integration on the side of the payment system will not be fast. Do not alert your clients that you have a new payment system until you have tested it yourself. Be patient, everything will be fine. If the KYC requirements of a payment system are suspiciously low, be prepared for it to cease to exist in a few months. So don't bet too high on it in your road map.

Contrary to skeptics’ expectations and predictions, the volume of cryptocurrency transactions continues to grow. The so-called stablecoins show the greatest stability, as they are used in payments more often than super volatile Bitcoin or Ethereum. Let us remind you that Bitcoin was losing more than 60% of its value last November. It does not make much sense to use such currencies in transactions. Stablecoins, tied to fiat and backed by bank reserves, are a different story. According to coinmarketcap.com, the most popular stablecoins with the largest capitalization are currently Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), and Binance USD (BUSD). Taken together, these findings allow us to make long-term predictions for the continuous increase in cryptocurrency transactions, and this is a good sign for Forex brokers. 

Why Forex brokers are better off with a crypto gateway 

Those brokers who don't yet have a cryptocurrency gateway to accept payments should take care of it now. Regulators are closely monitoring financial companies. As a result,  licenceless brokers can no longer accept payments by bank cards. This means that if a company cannot have a bank account, accepting Visa or Mastercard payments is not available to it. As an option, the broker can accept payments through electronic payment systems and other intermediaries who charge exhorbitant commission, easily in the 8-10% range. Also, due to the tightening regulation in the financial sector, customers from some countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East no longer have access to bank processing. In addition, cryptocurrency holders are interested in working with companies that are willing to accept it. From what we have seen in recent years, the trend of financial overregulation is going to continue all over the world. So if a broker wants to expand their geography and get more varied customers, gain a competitive advantage or just stay afloat, it is better to start learning how to work with cryptocurrency now.

In our previous articles, we talked about the pros and cons of accepting cryptocurrencies and how to automate these payments in your company.

Is accepting cryptocurrency always a good thing for a company, and which companies are better off avoiding cryptopayments altogether?

What is a cryptocurrency payment gateway?

A cryptocurrency payment gateway is a service that allows merchants to accept cryptocurrency as a payment method. Crypto gateways make it easy for businesses to accept cryptocurrency as payment alongside fiat money and settle transactions in real time.

Crypto gateways are growing in popularity due to the widespread use of cryptocurrencies and the security benefits they provide. Many companies are starting to accept cryptocurrency payments to get ahead and enter new markets. 

With UpTrader Pay already built into the UpTrader CRM, every broker can automate cryptocurrency payments in literally two clicks. If your company uses another CRM, integrating UpTrader Pay crypto gateway is just as easy because it's a standalone product.

So what are the pros and cons of accepting cryptocurrency?

Most often, brokers accept payments directly to their own wallets. This way, they are able to completely avoid some sensitive issues. For instance, cryptocurrency transactions exclude chargebacks and risks associated with intermediaries. Every broker has probably encountered a situation where large amounts of money are stuck with payment intermediaries for months and sometimes years. In some cases, this money is never returned and the broker bears reputational and financial costs.  

The difficulty with accepting payments in cryptocurrency may arise for licensed brokers who avoid dealing with cryptocurrency so as not to anger the regulators. The best way for them to de facto not deal with cryptocurrency is to use cryptocurrency gateways such as BitPay, PayPal, and Coinbase Commerce. In return, companies get fiat currency into their bank accounts and stay within legal bounds. This way, companies can offer customers alternative payment methods and eliminate uncertainty related to cryptocurrencies.

Accepting cryptopayments automatically

Manually accepting crypto payments may overburden your financial department, because processing these transactions is quite a task: you need to compare the requested amount in the CRM and in the wallet, then you need to identify the customer who made the request by the amount they requested, and often two sums are not the same. Then you have to call your customers to find out who transferred the money, and so on. Of course, it is better to automate the process, and we have already written a piece on how to do this:  

Connect crypto gateway or how to start accepting crypto without stress.

Last year MetaQuotes suspended selling White Label that caused the forex industry to start looking for alternatives. Most sensitively it was perceived by small brokers who can’t afford to spend a couple of extra thousands dollars for the MetaTrader 5 Full license. Therefore the good alternative for them turns out to be с-Trader White Label, whose policy is pretty mild and price is reasonable. However MetaQuotes remains the main trading platform provider and it still sells the Full License MetaTrader and companies are still looking forward to the opportunity to work with MetaTrader. It’s still possible, but the price for the base version has been increased from $5000 to $7500. For those companies who can’t handle this price, a good alternative is c-Trader White Label.

Please learn more about c-Trader and MetaTrader Full License from our previous article.
Or contact us directly to get more information. 

We regularly get requests from prop firms for CRM integration. Let's discuss the difference between a Proprietary Trading Firm and Retail Trading.

What exactly is a proprietary trading firm also known as a "prop shop"?

Proprietary trading happens when a prop firm hires a prop trader to trade company funds. That is, a prop firm is a type of financial company that hires a trader who will capitalize on the company's money acting on its behalf. Such companies became widely known after the financial crisis of 2008 when their speculations with huge sums on the market of such derivatives as CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), credit default swaps and other synthetic instruments had quite a serious effect on the mortgage market which eventually collapsed and led several major banks to bankruptcy. Back then, almost any competent trader could become a proprietary trader and get access to big money management.

Key differences

The key difference between retail trading and proprietary trading is that a retail trader trades with their own funds, while a prop trader trades with the funds of a company which specifically hired such a person to capitalize on the firm's assets and make even more money. In this case, the prop trader takes up to 70% of the profits for their speculations, while the company itself gets 30%, even though it provides the money and takes the risk. 

Prop traders working for prop firms are usually subcontractors, as opposed to traditional brokers hired by the company. Funding in such companies is shared among all the prop traders who trade with the firm.

Who to trade with: retail or prop firms?

When trading with a retail broker, the trader transfers their own funds to a trading account. The broker in this case provides leverage, thus increasing the trader’s turnover, a platform, and access to the trading instruments, normally charging commission for it. The trader is still limited by their own capital, but on the plus side, they don’t have to follow trading rules set by the firm, since they own the funds they trade with. 

As for prop trading, it has wide prospects of managing huge amounts of company's capital and thus receiving potential profit, but the trader must observe strict rules. 

Getting into trading

Here, everything is simple: retail trading is open to all. The broker sets the minimum deposit amount, the trader deposits the account and starts trading. A prop trader, unless they have a reputation, needs to prove their abilities. To do that, the trader is given a trading account, usually with demo funds, where they trade for a certain period of time. At the end of this period, the result is evaluated and a decision to provide real capital for management is made. 

Brokerage and prop firms often earn their money by training newcomers. There is nothing inherently bad in it if the company does not try and trick you by promising a fortune for depositing your account, but simply provides a training service for a fixed fee.

SCAM 

Prop trading market is full of scams, as well as the retail trading market. So before you decide to fund your account, you should weigh the pros and cons and research the company’s background online. Do not fall for marketing campaigns that require you to make rash decisions. For companies, it is a way to get fast money from new clients, for a trader, it entails a high probability of rapid capital loss. The rule “If you think that the offer is too good to be true, perhaps it is not worth to risk your money” always works.