Pelican is the product of brothers Peter and Mike Read who, after spending seven years building financial exchange platforms for companies such as Asset Match, BrickX, Lending Well, noticed a gap in the market for a truly integrated social trading product.

The founders realised that traders were sharing their trade ideas with friends on a variety of instant chat forums. By marrying pro-trader execution with real time interaction, Pelican is designed to solve this disjointed practise as well as introducing a host of unique features.

The new concept has been backed with private equity by former senior IG executives, Will Armitage and Andrew Mackay, as well as noted early stage technology investor Tom Fleming (Just-Eat, Not On the High Street, Spot FX).

Pelican, available as an app, is the first trading platform to be authorised by the FCA for social trading. The cutting edge design enables users to navigate seamlessly between chat and trade functions.

Traders can create and customise their own private chat groups, where live trades are displayed. Users can then discuss, challenge or copy each other’s trades, all in real time.

Mike Read, co-founder and head of product at Pelican, said:

“The FinTech industry has talked about social trading platforms for years, but how can they be truly social if they don’t involve a trader’s existing network?

“The concept of Pelican is very simple – a top class trading experience combined with private social interaction between your own friends. Pelican is very much a practical trading tool, where we have been very careful to blend social interaction the way traders want it.

“By allowing traders to share live data we think we have introduced a new dynamic to the way traders make decisions. If you can see that your friend or an expert is making some profitable calls you’ll be sure to learn and develop as a trader yourself.”

A unique feature is the ability for users to challenge, or copy a friend’s trade. A challenge trade allows the user to take the inverse of a friend’s trade, monitors the progress and announces a winner.

The premium-trading element of Pelican offers over 10,000 global markets with competitive spreads. Pelican is very much targeted at those traders who want to ‘pull the trigger’ themselves but like to share and discuss ideas with friends.

A beta testing period revealed that traders exchange 55 messages with their fellow traders for every trade made – Pelican allows traders to chat and trade within the same app for the first time.