Exclusive: Admirals Unveils Trading Platform; Overcoming Rebranding's "Lost Opportunities"

With rising competition, retail brokers must evolve their services and offerings. Estonia-based Admirals, a well-known name in the forex and contracts for differences (CFDs) brokerage space, has launched a in-house trading platform, complementing its existing offerings of MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5.

Admirals' Own Trading Platform

While MT4 and MT5, both developed by Metaquotes, are widely used by FX and CFDs trades, these platforms might be a bit complex for beginner traders. And Admirals is hitting this pain point with its new in-house platform.

"There's a whole new generation of traders that are coming into the market, and we wanted to give them a much simpler interface," Daniel Skowronski, the Chief Revenue Officer at Admirals, told Finance Magnates in an interview. "Generally, this is geared more towards the newer trader or somebody who's looking for a very easy-to-use platform in terms of simplicity."

To keep things simple, Admirals developed the in-house trading platform as web-only. The platform users will have access to over 7,400 financial instruments, including stocks, ETFs, forex pairs, and other CFDs on commodities and indices.

"We all know that the more professional traders make up a bulk of the trading volume," Skowronski said. "But in terms of the number of active users, most likely, a lot of the profitability comes from the beginner traders versus the intermediate ones."

Further, he highlighted that a in-house trading platform provides much more flexibility to the brokers.

Costs Are High

However, developing a in-house trading platform needs a lot of resources. It takes a dedicated tech team of significant size, along with a reliable infrastructure. Also, the trading platforms are very demanding: they need to be very responsive with minimal latency and guarantee close to 100% uptime.

Admirals revealed that the development of the native trading platform started at the beginning of 2020 and moved to the testing phase in 2022. It has retested the platform and its features in the past 12 months.

"It is working as it's supposed to with no bugs. There are no issues," added the CRO. "It's up all the time because we're dealing with people's money. When you're launching something like this, it has to go through a very rigorous testing process."

"There's a lot of regulatory requirements from this comes out too. So we did not do the testing for our own users, but we have also tested the platform from a regulatory standpoint."

Further, the Estonian broker had to strengthen its tech team over the years for the development of the trading platform. At present, about 30 percent of Admirals staff are working in its technology division.

The cost associated with developing and maintaining a trading platform has enabled only big brokerage names to offer their own trading platform. While some brokers like eToro, Trading212, and Plus500 only offer services with their own trading platform, others like IG and CMC Markets offer native platforms along with MetaTrader options.

However, most smaller FX/CFDs brands rely on third-party trading platforms like MT4/MT5 and cTrader, among others, to offer services. MT4 and MT5 are also popular among advanced traders. According to Finance Magnates Intelligence data, MT4 still captured about 44 percent of the market in Q2 2023, followed by MT5 with nearly 33 percent.

Admirals' Ambitions

Admirals was founded in 2001 by Alexander Tsikhilov, now the Chairman of the broker, and is one of the oldest brands in the industry today. Previously, it was known as Admiral Markets, but the broker went through a branding overhaul to become Admirals. Although rebranding decisions are tough, Admirals went through it with its future prospects in mind.

"We were purely just a FX/CFDs brand traditionally for about 20 years. Now, we want to change it," said Skowronski. "We don't know what that future is gonna look like. Even though we had this whole brand of 'Markets', Admiral Markets didn't fit that new vision of what Admirals could be."

"We decided to just drop the 'Markets' keeping the Admirals name so that we don't lose that connection of branding that we have built over time. But we felt it was necessary as we tried to grow the brand."

Challenges of Rebranding

Building a recognizable brand takes years, and companies spend significant amounts of money to achieve that. A rebranding move would require a company to invest in brand building again.

According to Skowronski, one of the biggest challenges with Admirals' rebranding was Search Engine Optimization. He said: "Admiral Markets has decades of presence. It is linked to millions and millions of things important to Google search and our online presence. When people search forex, we have so much organic traffic."

"The struggle [with rebranding] is how do you balance. With Admirals, in place of Admiral Markets, we would not lose everything. Our biggest challenge with that is how do we maintain and keep all that organic traffic that took us 20 years to build."

The rebranding process is also expensive. Although it takes time and money to change the brand name everywhere, online and offline, Skowronski highlighted that the biggest cost is from "lost opportunities," which is the loss of organic traffic directed to the old brand.

Strategical Moves

Admirals was established in Europe. Now, the broker is present in emerging markets like Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The broker is now focused on grasping a share of the African markets, but it's "relatively new" there. As the entire African continent can be a bit large for operations, Admirals is targeting three of its largest markets: Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. It already has licenses in places in Kenya and South Africa and a regional office in Nigeria. Skowronski further stressed that Admirals' native trading platform, along with its mobile app, will also help it to penetrate the African markets.

"It's a place where technology is advancing very quickly, and infrastructure is advancing," he said. "Africa has always been very mobile-friendly, and now they're starting to upgrade to more smartphones."

"Admirals can really position itself by offering the native trading platform and easy-to-download mobile app, making them easier to access with very little bandwidth."