Finance Magnates London Summit Catch-Up: What happened at the leading financial event in London

Author: Alexey Kutsenko

Last week, the Tools for Brokers team attended the Finance Magnates London Summit.

The 3-day event brought together experts and market players from all areas of fintech. Together, we spent many hours networking, learning about the latest trends, and listening to insightful panel discussions.

Today, we’d like to share with you the key takeaways from the summit:

• Multiplatform is continuing to be the main trend. Brokers with different volumes and focuses turn to multiple platforms to diversify their services and enhance their risk management strategy. While some brokers consider developing their own platforms for trading, the consensus seems to be that it’s the most efficient to utilise ready-made market solutions.
• Synthetic instruments within the Trade Processor liquidity bridge were a hit. We were pleasantly surprised to see so much interest in the functionality. It is one of our favourites too. Synthetic instruments make brokers more flexible and offer traders atypical currency pairs. This turns into a significant competitive advantage.
• The UK financial market is doing well despite all the turmoil of recent years and the strict regulations. Many established and new brokers are going down the institutional path and focusing on providing liquidity to other market players rather than building a traditional brokerage.
• At TFB, we’ve been highlighting the rise of a new generation of prop trading companies for nearly a year now. And the summit has once again confirmed that the prop trading trend is strong and is not going anywhere. Several expert panels at the event were dedicated to prop trading, and we’ve also had many exciting conversations with prop trading prospects who were actively looking at implementing our solutions in their environments.
• Another thing we noticed is that many hedge funds are considering trading directly on liquidity via our Trade Processor bridge using built-in FIX API and aggregating multiple LP sources. Overall, we’ve noticed that hedge funds are much more interested in enhancing their technical setup to improve performance and automate their workflow.
• Many conversations centered around AI in fintech and the possible ways to utilise it. Our perception was that while there is a strong interest in AI right now, many are holding off implementing anything in their own firms for the moment, watching what everyone else is doing. It looks like we need a big player or two to announce their integration of AI, triggering the rest of the market to follow.

Overall, spirits were high during the summit. After a few very turbulent years, and despite current events, it looks like everyone is ready to accelerate and take a step up next year, whether through a more powerful technical setup, launching in new markets, or a business pivoting to a new model.