Imagine you’re an inventor. You’re starting with a blank sheet. You have all the ideas, most of the tools, all the experience and expertise you need to build your brilliant invention (and a bunch of willing helpers too).

That’s how we started with X Open Hub. We took Android’s open application philosophy and started from scratch. We came up with the most complete, open and adaptable trading solution for the forex and CFD market that meets the complete spectrum of requirements for banks, brokers, liquidity providers and software houses.

It was quite an invention process – something we’re very proud of. It took us six years of development to come up with the best possible solution – thousands of hours of study, research and analysis – all funnelled into a rigorous development process to enable the maximum adaptability, usefulness and innovative functionality we knew our clients would demand.

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, we think. Take ours: X Open Hub. It is not only our new name, but it also deliberately reflects Android’s open philosophy that we so passionately believe in.

In a nutshell, it’s the name of our proprietary open API software platform for the forex market. X Open Hub: we’re not a bank or forex brokerage, we’re solution providers for them. Of course, we have competitors – we couldn’t invent them away. But we made sure that our technology can work hand in hand with theirs, while retaining our own system’s unique advantages. Here are just a few of them:

• Our open API – software companies, banks and forex brokerages can build onto our technology – reflecting the Android philosophy of function: it is completely open, enabling our partners to create and build fully functional platforms like xStation, through the market apps place xStore.pro.
• X Open Hub is open and free for software houses and developers. The better the applications and platforms built on XOH, the stronger the ecosystem.
• The speed of our executions is four times faster than any comparable system on the market.
• X Open Hub’s hedging solution for our clients, xRisk, is designed to be the most rigorous and comprehensive, helping our clients minimise risk and maximise profits and efficiency.
• White labels – our competitors charge upwards of £5000 for white labels systems – in comparison X Open Hub’s is free and simple to set up with a pioneering automated online web tool.
• Advanced charting enabling multiple assets capability through trading directly from the chart and chart detachments.
• Our proprietary open API software platform is the ‘new kid on the block’ compared to bigger players in the market: using our advanced, open technology enables forex brokerages to differentiate their products from competitors still using dated, restricted systems. We believe the future lies with open trading technology where our broker partners and their end users can customise their platform technology to their preference.
• Our trading environment is ‘cloud’ based, enabling customers to use our software on Mac computers, mobile and web. Because of this, we also do not need to charge upwards of £100,000 to clients using our servers.

For banks and forex brokerages, we believe X Open Hub is the complete solution to run a forex or CFD business. Integral elements include the fastest web-based trading platform, mobile apps, integrated social and binary trading, robust back office management and intelligent risk management tools.

The emergence of more open technology has been hugely beneficial to market participants, giving them many more options when considering the purchase of a new trading platform, along with more regular developments to the functionality of these platforms. But while more frequent and fertile development is a feature of open platforms, robustness and availability are still prized properties for participants. We interviewed over 300 retail brokers and traders and the most important property of a platform for them was its stability. It is important to provide all the multi-asset functionality, without sacrificing the overall stability of the platform; that is the challenge for most technology vendors. You can add numerous new features, instruments and asset classes but if the platform crashes, then it is of little use.

Retail traders are also becoming more demanding when it comes to low latency, which is an issue for an increasing number of them, so there is a need for more co-location, but most retail traders do not have the resources to set up their own co-located servers or trading engines. This is where cloud servers can play a role. Traders in both the retail and institutional space are becoming more familiar with and more confident in using cloud technology. It is a case of taking it step by step. Cloud services and outsourcing are not hugely popular at the moment, but they will become increasingly popular due to the significant cost reduction they bring. When you consider that retail traders are becoming more sophisticated and demanding lower latency with greater efficiency then brokers will have to turn to outsourcing providers that can offer 24 hour support so they do not have to spend the money on server administration.

The market has become extremely competitive and there is a need to offer retail traders a very stable infrastructure, but also one with enough flexibility for new features to be added. Doing this on your own will be extremely expensive for brokers, so they should consider outsourcing and hosting more of their services on cloud servers.

Starting from the principle of inventing the best model for the market from scratch, our open API and cloud server is always being improved based on our partners’ needs and feedback. With X Open Hub you’re making the best choice for starting or expanding your forex and/or CFD business.

For the family of products that make up X Open Hub, including third party partners, find out more at www.xopenhub.pro.