Choosing a liquidity bridge in 2023: key criteria

Author: Alexey Kutsenko

In terms of the brokerage infrastructure, choosing a liquidity bridge is probably the most important decision of all. The bridge, similar to a heart in the human body, is the central organ in the brokerage that powers and enables all other processes.

But there is no need to be paralysed by the importance of the selection process. Our expert tips will help you make the best decision to help your brokerage thrive.

Choosing a liquidity bridge: the basics

With many market players, deciding on what bridge to look further into can take time and effort. The points below will help you narrow down your options.

• Look at the company’s background. When was it founded? How many clients or partners does the company have? How big are they? Does anyone in your peer group know about this vendor?
• Evaluate their product and service offerings. Does the company provide professional technical support? Is it 24/7? Does it have supplementary solutions that enrich the bridge and cover other broker needs?
• Find out what clients are saying. See if there is feedback available publicly and also ask around. The finance world is pretty reserved, so you’re unlikely to find many companies talking about their liquidity bridges in general, but there is usually something out there. At least, there have to be case studies or testimonials available on the vendor’s website.

Choosing a liquidity bridge: technological criteria

Once you have narrowed down to a smaller pool of bridge candidates, it’s time to look into the technical capabilities of the solutions.

Pro tip: Always test solutions in your environment or a sandbox. What you see in marketing materials sometimes differs in real life due to your unique infrastructure and other factors. Testing can take a couple of weeks, but it will help you to avoid stress and nasty surprises down the road.

• Overall performance. How fast is the liquidity bridge? How does it compare to your current solution? When testing performance, talk to vendors to guarantee you’re using the most optimal setup. Also, check the solution’s availability – the last thing you need is to have a bridge that causes downtime and damages your reputation and profits.
• Technical support. Does the vendor provide 24/7 support? How professional is the tech team? How well do you interact with the support team? Is it by email or chat? You will most likely have to work with technical support no matter how perfect the bridge that you choose is. So make sure you are completely comfortable with the workflow.
• Liquidities pool. Quality is better than quantity, but when it comes to liquidity providers (LPs), you want to partner with a bridge that offers a decent selection. As you’ll be working with different traders and their orders, getting the best price will be much easier if you have access to a variety of LPs.
• Multiplatform. Does the potential bridge operate on a single trading platform, or does it offer alternatives? The multiplatform approach makes brokers more secure against external risks, so it’s wise to look for bridges that support more than one platform. Trade Processor by TFB, for example, works with MetaTrader, cTrader, and Match-Trader.
• Complementary solutions. The liquidity bridge may be the heart of the brokerage, but brokers usually require an ecosystem of products for their operations. At TFB, we provide PAMM for money management and copy trading, various plugins and apps for niche needs, and our bridge has built-in data analytics. For our clients, this means they can get fully compatible supportive solutions that strengthen their offering to traders.
• Unique tools to make you stand out. Finally, the criteria that should not be underestimated are the tools that other bridges don’t offer that can be your unique competitive advantage. This can be trading over the weekend to attract new clients, synthetic instruments that help you build unique pairs, or anything else. While technically, it’s not a must, having access to those features means you can position yourself against other brokers.

That’s it for the key criteria for liquidity bridge selection. If you’d like to learn more about choosing the right bridge or for any other questions, please feel free to email us at sales@t4b.com.