• Ken Chan, Managing Director at ViewTrade Holding Corp.


• 23.02.2022 03:23 pm

1. Please tell us a little about ViewTrade Holding Corp's history.

In 1999, ViewTrade Securities, which is now a subsidiary of ViewTrade Holding Corp., was founded to provide turnkey solutions to meet the technology, information and brokerage needs of brokerage firms and banks worldwide. A few short years later, to expand on that success and provide more solutions for our clients, we invested in our fintech subsidiary Orbis Systems.

Over the past 20 years, the firm has evolved to provide cloud-based API infrastructure and services to empower complete trading and investing lifecycle products, from account onboarding to executing the trade, for financial firms worldwide. Our solutions help banks, broker-dealers, advisors and fintech solution providers compete by offering solutions for U.S. equity and options trading, as well as a growing list of global markets. We enable firms to create their customer’s user experience without the burden of building the backbone of technology that is necessary to meet regulatory, vendor, operational, and connectivity requirements.

2. What does the company do? What is your geographic footprint? What recent developments would you highlight?

We are in the business of digital financial technology. By providing simple, yet powerful technology tools to online brokers and fintech startups around the world, we level the playing field for customers who used to be impeded from the lucrative U.S. markets. We create opportunities for newer social trading apps to come to market more quickly. Instead of a company having to invest heavily in a technical engineering team, we get them up and running more efficiently with our flexible turnkey API system and our white-label trading platforms. Recently, our company has been able to equip our clients with the ability to trade fractional shares in U.S. equities, streamline account opening with completely digital CIP (Customer Identification Program) solutions, and expand our turnkey operations from our Taiwan office to better serve our clients in the Asia-Pacific region. We have a global presence in four countries and work with clients in more than 20 countries on four continents representing millions of individual investors.

3. Looking back over the last two years, what have been the key drivers of your growth?

The sheer volume of trading that is taking place at the retail level today would have been impossible with the technology that was available only a few years ago. We have been the technological leader in innovating the solutions that have aided this massive growth in online retail trading across the globe. We are doing this by making our capabilities available to underserved communities around the world in an affordable way, with a dedicated philosophy of putting the customer first when creating products and services. Along with the increase in the international retail trading market comes a need for streamlining account onboarding and account funding. In some markets, our clients are initiating new accounts at a rate not seen even in the U.S. We met the challenge that our fintech clients were facing by developing faster and more robust global CIP technology while at the same time providing FFI (Foreign Financial Institution) services to get the customer's accounts funded affordably and in a fraction of the time.

4. Can you please give us some specific examples of how your solutions have really had a positive impact for your clients?

Our clients come to us for a variety of reasons, but their underlying need is always a fintech solution to help run their business more efficiently. The four most popular solutions include: risk monitoring, connectivity, FFI services and the onboarding of accounts. For example, with the increased trading volume over the past two years our fully automated risk management and regulatory monitoring platform, Watchmen, has become one of our most asked for solutions as it eliminates our client’s regulatory risk management responsibilities. Without it, firms would have to implement an entire compliance team to manually monitor the transactions or create their own technology, potentially putting the firm’s finances at risk or resort to engaging in illegal practices such as spoofing, layering, wash-trades, etc. Our Watchmen system is our technological innovation that has directly allowed our clients to satisfy their accountability and due diligence to FINRA.

5. What are the main trends that will determine how your company develops over the coming two years or so?

The main trends we are seeing affect the industry are increased use of cryptocurrencies, greater access to global markets, and a more efficient money service business. With our technologies, we are spearheading the concept of Brokerage as Service which will significantly improve and set the new industry standard for customer experience. This is important now more than ever as global market access becomes more accessible, the variety of trading instruments - especially cryptocurrency trading - becomes more popular, and our capacity for money service transactions continues to push the envelope in what was previously considered adequate.

6. What does the competitive landscape look like from your point of view? How would you summarize all this in one or two sentences?

Financial technology is an ever-evolving space and we welcome competition because it sparks innovation and directly benefits the end-user of our products. The space we operate in is also relatively small, so in some instances our competitors are our clients and ultimately our goal is to provide the best services we can to help our clients succeed.