Li be rte x: Tr ad in g Up
How Libertex is trading up its tech game 02
WRITTEN BY
DAN BRIGHTMORE PRODUCED BY
JAMES PEPPER
03
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LIBERTEX
Libertex is pushing a cloud-first, big data strategy underpinned by security and agile transformation
F
ounded in Russia, Libertex Group (formerly Forex Club), was originally established as an academy to teach peo-
ple how to trade in Forex. The originators decided to create their own trading platform and take a lead in the market. Five years ago, amid growing instability and regulatory issues in the Russian market, international expansion began in Latin America. Three months later, activating a licence 04
the company held with a Cyprus regulator, Libertex made the move into Europe. During the journey from single market operator to international trading platform provider Chief Information Officer Grant Brett has led the transformation at Libertex. “Five years ago, it took us a quarter to achieve a delivery cycle, but now we’re delivering every day,” says Brett. “We’ve gone through big changes of our culture, technologies and work practices to realise that.” That change of culture began with the IT strategy Brett implemented as part of a threeyear plan that focused on cloud first. “We looked at the five stages of our maturity: Level One being Ad hoc. Level Two, Repeatable. Level Three, Defined. Level Four, Measured, Level Five, Optimised,” explains Brett. “We discovered we were quite low
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CLICK TO WATCH : ‘LIBERTEX – TU SCOUT FINANCIERO’ 07 in the scale, and that a company with
technical mobility with a plug-and-play
20-year-old legacy systems needed
mentality rather than tight integration,”
big transformational changes. We
reveals Brett. “We had to forget about
realised early on we needed to push
the legacy and dispose of technical
a cloud-first, Big Data strategy allied
debt: because when you’re a com-
to security and agile transformation.
mercially driven company things often
Of course, none of this would be pos-
need to be done quickly to meet com-
sible without utilising our competitive
mercial demand.” Operating with a
advantage, the capable people in our
hybrid approach to cloud, Brett’s team
organisation.”
is tasked with implementing DevOps,
The cloud-first strategy at Libertex targeted transforming from monolithic
SysOps and NetOps while preparing for BizOps.
systems to service-oriented archi-
“The game we’re in is the challenge
tecture. “We adopted AWS as our
of balancing commercial delivery with
cloud partner and began focusing on
the architectural purity of our platform,” w w w.l i be r tex. com
LIBERTEX
08
says Brett. “As we transition away from
environment could have scaled 320%
monolithic systems we have to make
overnight to cope with that month of
sure the benefits outweigh the cost.
activity. By moving key elements and
We’re seeing plenty of cases that prove
utilising the elasticity of the cloud, we
we’re on the right track. For exam-
were able to scale up easily and back
ple, two years ago the industry was
down after the hype was over.”
gripped by the latest round of crypto-
Helping drive transformation at
currency hype. We offer Crypto trading
Libertex, and making sure it’s ready for
instruments, and in one month our
the next market hype, the company is
traffic increased 320%. The Bitcoin
partnered with Elastic, which offers end-
price was going crazy and without
point security and open source search
having made some of those key trans-
and analytics solutions. Libertex also
formations, we would have been dead
partners with Salesforce for flexible
in the water. There’s no way that our
CRM services managing the sales
E XE CU T I VE PRO FI LE
Grant Brett A resourceful, analytical, and highly adaptable executive, with a proven background in executive board level leadership, as CIO & Transformational leader at Libertex, Grant Brett formulates strategies and tactical improvements that consistently exceed ROI expectations. “I offer expertise in driving operational excellence and major projects that meet organisational objectives, while propelling transformational improvements, building key alliances, and high-performance teams,” says Brett, the former CIO/CTO of Goldbet Sportwetten and Betonline.com. “I’m consistently defined by exceptional identification and implementation of significant cost savings initiatives company wide, while managing small and large business transformation initiatives that exceed $40mn, and guiding a staff of 300 specialists, exceeding all challenges through critical thinking, and business intelligence expertise.” Brett’s background working across a diverse range of industries, from manufacturing and distribution to banking and telecommunications, has seen him develop the flexibility to meet a variety of challenges while dealing with diverse cultures and delivery schedules focused on optimising environments, saving money, building teams and developing systems.
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LIBERTEX
organisation, sales targets and core
“ Because we’re a mobile first company, we’ve had to spend a lot of time and effort to simplify the mobile space and make it a fast pathway for our customers to understand trading” — Grant Brett, CIO & Transformational Leader, Libertex
customer interactions. “We’ve also used some interesting tools to help us in that journey towards real-time CRM,” adds Brett. “Mixpanel have also helped us with our customer communication tools.” Meanwhile, the company’s own internal communications have been given a boost through its recent association with CommPeak. The leading VoIP provider was brought in to enhance connectivity and improve the efficiency
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KE E P I N G L I BERT EX I N T HE GAM E
The common theme with any ecommerce business is acquiring, converting and retaining the customer,” reasons Grant Brett, CIO & Transformational Leader at Libertex. “They’re absolutely similar in terms of process and strategy. The only thing that’s different is the ‘game’. So, the dynamics of the particular ‘game’ is really only a small part of the overall process f low. Having that experience in different industries (gaming, manufacturing, banking, telcos) helps me guide our team to apply learnings that can improve our trading platform.” Brett recalls that four years ago he realised the company needed to build a bonus engine but faced resistance from old school thinking that dictated that’s not how things are done with Forex. “I remember saying, ‘guys, we need to build a bonus engine and be running hundreds of campaigns every day to attract customers.’ Of course, it’s all changed now because the market’s become more competitive, while regulation has become much tighter. I’m here to make sure we look outside of our bubble at what other industries, like gaming, are doing to make sure we maximise the potential for our business.”
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LIBERTEX
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“ The game we’re in is the challenge of balancing commercial delivery with the architectural purity of our platform” — Grant Brett, CIO & Transformational Leader, Libertex
of staff collaborations with a range of multi-channel engagement solutions (VoIP, SMS, DID, PBX, Dialer). Brett also notes the importance of working with reseller IndigoSoft. A company with many years of experience on software development projects for financial clients, IndigoSoft develops IT systems for brokerage companies and investment funds. It also has expertise in connecting to different liquidity providers and electronic stock exchange gateways, including the integrated software of third-party trading platforms. Rising to the challenges posed by the need to meet the demands of commercial delivery, Brett believes the solution is more than just technology. “It’s about people,” he says. “Changing people’s thinking, let’s say, from hosted to cloud environments, where they need to start considering the economics of what they’re delivering, how it’s going to be deployed and used. That was a big issue for us. Introducing a message broker met with resistance. When you’re used to dealing with monolithic systems, point-to-point integration is rare, but when you start w w w.l i be r tex. com
13
LIBERTEX
moving into service-oriented architecture then you need to have a message box. But when people get it, the lights come on and everyone’s on board. Thanks to our close relationship with AWS we’re migrating everything to Kafka. The world’s changing a lot, particularly with third-party integrations, now it’s all about data streaming, so Kafka is helping us a lot.” Brett notes that Libertex is unique among trading platforms as it’s closely aligned to a much stronger control 14
1997
Year founded
2.2mn+ Clients worldwide
700
Number of employees
over risk while reacting to market trends for mobile products. “Margin trading is quite a risky product, but the stakes that you make when you go about opening a trade, the stake that
“ We’re keeping pace with the key issues around Big Data, introducing agility and managing security, while ensuring our platforms are scalable. We’re not aiming to be bleeding edge, but we’re in the game” — Grant Brett, CIO & Transformational Leader, Libertex
you trade, is the limit of your risk,” he explains. “Because we’re a mobile first company, we’ve had to spend a lot of time and effort to simplify the mobile space and make it a fast pathway for our customers to understand trading. We’re looking at creating a different window of opportunity for people to trade with us. If they’re on their mobile, it’s easy to do, they can make a trade and monitor it on the move. It’s not like you imagine a trading desk with several
“We’re always evolving and finding new ways to work with product launches reaching the market,” says Brett. “We’re keeping pace with the key issues around Big Data, introducing agility and managing security, while ensuring our platforms are scalable. We’re not aiming to be bleeding edge, but we’re in the game.” That game is good to go globally, with Libertex setting sights on addressing performance in South America and Asia. “We’re looking at ways we can break up our environment so that we can distribute it worldwide and address any performance issues,” confirms Brett. “Again, AWS has been very helpmonitors at a control station. Our mar-
ful to us in this space. There’s always
ket is to bring people into the world of
a training or security issue to address,
trading because it’s already quite com-
but the commercial side of the busi-
petitive at the top end. We’re looking to
ness has all the tools it needs to be
expand the market from the bottom.”
successful. Looking ahead to 2020,
The pace of change at Libertex in the
now is the time for us to focus on devel-
past 12 months may have been swift
oping an IT-excellence programme, so
but Brett is proud that his IT team has
that we’re actually confident that data
risen to the challenge and technology
is good, performance is good, security
hasn’t been the bottleneck. The com-
is good, and we’re eliminating what’s
pany’s development centre in Belgrade
left of the monolithic solution.”
has taken on new staff (the IT department has swelled from 90 to 170). w w w.l i be r tex. com
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Libertex Indication Investments Ltd., CYSEC License number 164/12, Iacovou Tompazi 1, Vashiotis Business Center, 1st Floor Office 101, Neapoli 3107, Limassol, Cyprus T +357 22 025 100 www.libertex.com