As a company with over 15 years of experience working with retail brokers, hedge funds, and prop trading firms, Tools for Brokers (TFB) knows how vital and life-changing workflow automation can be for a business that’s highly intolerant of delays or errors.
Today, we will dive deeper into the topic, covering the main benefits retail brokerages can expect with automation. We will look at how to achieve your goals, examine major pitfalls, and provide examples of how the TFB Toolbox simplifies and streamlines many of the notoriously complex tasks that brokers struggle with.
Why Automation Matters in a Modern Brokerage
Modern retail brokerages rely heavily on technology.
In fact, without robust technology, their business would not exist.
Everything seems to be automated these days. We no longer get orders from traders via phone, nor do we need to manually type them in or pass them to partners on the liquidity provider side to execute. It all happens inside the software in a matter of milliseconds.
Not every solution and environment is the same, though; some solutions take longer to complete the process or might require manual intervention.
Those brokerages with full automation can process more data faster and execute traders’ orders with better pricing. They’re more accurate with every operation they facilitate and easily scalable, meaning that their growth is not hindered by bulky technology or failed executions that damage their reputation.
Key Benefits of Workflow Automation for Retail Brokers
Sometimes brokerages believe that automation is overrated, which often limits their growth potential.
Those who embrace automation, even for the smaller tasks, can enjoy multiple benefits for their businesses, including:
- Massive time savings by taking the repetitive tasks off the team’s to-do list
- Eliminate human errors that cause delays, as well as profit and reputational losses
- Faster and simpler scaling and expansion of operations
- Improved accuracy across all steps of the workflow
- Better alignment with regulatory norms and recommendations
- Exceeding client expectations with quicker and better execution
- Better understanding of the inner processes and trends through data analytics
Overall, automation is an excellent instrument for upgrading your brokerage and making it more resilient amid seemingly never-ending market turbulence. It’s also a powerful tool for maintaining complete control over each step of the operations and avoiding over-hiring in the team to manage the many small manual jobs, such as consolidating orders at the end of the day.
What Is the TFB Toolbox and How Does It Help Retail Brokers?
When you operate a brokerage, you have many nuances and requirements that might not be available through even the most comprehensive and well-thought-out solutions, such as the Trade Processor liquidity bridge.
As a result, you need more minor fixes, i.e. plugins and applications to take care of particular challenges or tasks within the brokerage.
If you have several plugins and applications, maintaining them can become cumbersome.
That’s where the TFB Toolbox comes in. This single-console solution helps brokers manage all their TFB plugins and applications via a single view. It also unlocks several additional features that make brokers’ lives much easier and better.
Besides the single point of access, brokers, hedge funds, and prop firms get:
- On-the-go changes and adjustments with immediate implementation.
- Autonomy to make decisions about the environment without involving tech support.
- Five access levels for security and administrative reasons.
- Live logs and real-time notifications to alert clients about events immediately after they happen.
Workflow Management Simplified with Plugins and Applications
Whether your brokerage is large or small, there’s plenty to manage. Workflows are notorious for expanding and becoming too complex for no good reason.
While plugins and applications aren’t superheroes, often they’re the ones that can turn things around completely and relieve brokers of the time-consuming, mundane, or repetitive tasks.
Here are a couple of examples of TFB solutions that achieve that.
Swap Changer
Swap Changer is an application that allows users to receive swap values of all specified symbols, either automatically from LMAX or OKX or manually using a CSV file.
Foremost, it enables swaps changing and updating with the help of markups and multipliers. You can apply the application to all users and to specific groups. The solution is designed using the Manager API.
What makes it flexible and easily configurable is that Swap Changer is not required to be directly installed on your server; you can run it from any PC. Also, brokers needing to update and change swap values for multiple symbols in MT5 can benefit from using the Swap Free Solution MT5 and the Swap Changer application MT5.
In this case, the required swap values can be updated via Swap Changer, and then the Swap Free Solution can work with the updated MT5 swap values.
Credit Management
Credit Management is an application that offers more flexible campaigns for credit deposit and transferring it to the balance.
The application also monitors the equity, free margin, and user balance values, and users can withdraw the assessed credit when they reach a specific limit. It monitors order updates during operation and performs particular actions, for example:
- Credit deposit, removal, and transferring to the balance
- Balance restoring
- Sending email notifications about the operations mentioned above
Plugins and Applications to Enhance Efficiency and Reduce Operational Risk
Brokerages operate in high-risk mode all the time. There’s a lot to keep up with and maintain to ensure everything runs smoothly and there are no unnecessary risks to the business.
Sometimes, achieving those goals is relatively easy, and all you need is a plugin or an application that targets your particular need.
Dynamic Leverage Changer
Dynamic Leverage Changer is a plugin that changes the margin rate of the positions and dynamically modifies the leverage of accounts on which the positions are opened.
- Netting and hedging position systems (MetaTrader 5)
- Four formulas of margin calculation: Forex, CFD, CFD-leverage, and CFD Index
- Schedules with different leverage values for symbols
StopOut plugin
StopOut plugin is a solution that prevents traders from significant losses during periods of high volatility on the market.
Once equity reaches the specified critical level, the plugin:
- Closes all orders on that account
- Makes the account ‘Read-only’
- Sends messages that StopOut has occurred via: email, internal MT mail, and push-notifications
- Restores the negative balance to zero or restores equity to the required minimum after all positions are closed
That way, the product helps brokers avoid risks and clients’ losses.
Negative Balance Protection
Negative Balance Protection is a plugin that prevents the broker from the consequences of situations when the trader’s balance drops below zero by:
- Returning the account’s negative balance to zero
- Withdrawing all or partial credit facility from that account
Common Mistakes Brokers Make with Workflow Automation
Brokers are permanently short on time, so if you can learn from someone else’s mistakes and save time, that should always be the default strategy.
Below are some of the most common mistakes brokers and other firms make when approaching workflow automation and efficiency.
- Only caring about automating things that are necessary for regulatory compliance. Legislators are prioritising clients’ safety, not your business’s success. Relying on them to guide you in the automation process leaves you vulnerable and falling behind the competition.
- Automating before optimising the processes. The golden rule of automation is first to review every single workflow and ensure it’s optimised, makes sense, and benefits the business. Only after that should you introduce automation measures. Skip the workflow review, and you end up with a broken process, which will not serve your business.
- Skipping customisations. Not everything can be custom and budget-friendly. However, if there are options to tailor solutions to your business needs, this has to be done even if those customisations are minor, such as changing the logic rules or playing with default settings to see what works for you.
- Ignoring your core stakeholders: clients and the team. If you’re in a management position and you’re toying with the idea of automation, it’s necessary to involve your team, get their insights, include them in the decision-making, and help them get up to speed with the new solutions once they’re implemented. The same goes for clients – not only does it make sense to lead the automation project with a client-centric mindset for cost-efficiency, but also so you don’t waste the team’s time by implementing changes nobody benefits from.
Finally, failing to take the feedback loop hole route always backfires. Anything you do in the company, big or small, needs to be reviewed and improved over time based on the numbers you see in the analytics, the feedback you get from clients and employees, and the goals and vision for the company.
Final Thoughts: Embracing the Future of Brokerage Workflow Automation
With turbulent times not going away anytime soon, clients’ patience growing thinner daily, and the competition not letting you breathe, automation is the ultimate instrument for maintaining your sanity and thriving in challenging environments.
If you’re hesitating about launching an automation project, know that you don’t have to make it bigger than it needs to be. Start with the most pressing processes and tasks that take up most of your time or efforts. Research whether they can be solved with minor changes to the workflow.
In TFB’s experience, many clients overestimate the complexity of automating the process. Also, they’re often unaware of the tools that can simplify their daily brokerage management. We always recommend talking to a technology provider you trust to make sure you spend minimal time and resources and get the most benefit.
If you’d like to talk to us about automating your brokerage or any other software solution for your business, please email us at sales@t4b.com.
