"The priority is simple: move at the speed the opportunity deserves." That is how the new chief executive of VCG Markets, Brian Myers, frames his mandate, barely weeks into the role. It is not the kind of language that hedges. After two decades in the retail trading industry, most recently in a senior position at Equiti, he arrived at VCG with a specific view of what the company already had and what it still needed to do with it.
What it already had, in his telling, was considerable. The AI technology was live. The client base was real and growing across more than 70 countries. The team was in place. His job, as he sees it, is not to redesign the foundations but to accelerate what sat on top of them.
A Global Broker That Started in the Region
VCG Markets is headquartered in the UAE, and the CEO is clear that the country is not an afterthought. "The UAE is our home base, and we take that seriously," he said. "It's a sophisticated market, and we intend to be one of the leading names here." But he pushes back against the idea that the broker's ambitions are constrained by geography. "We're not a regional broker with global ambitions. We're a global broker that started in the region."
The distinction matters in terms of where VCG is actively building presence. With a Mauritian license and another Cat 5 authorisation in the UAE, VCG appears to be targeting the emerging markets. The approach in each, he says, will be the same: genuine localisation of the product rather than surface-level translation. "That's what market fit actually means."
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What may surprise some observers is his read on the retail traders in those markets. The industry, he argues, consistently underestimates them. "Traders in Kenya, Lebanon, Southeast Asia, they're not looking for a simpler product. They're looking for a better one."
"AI Isn't a Feature We Added... It's Woven into Our Platforms"
The retail trading space in 2026 is, by any measure, saturated. For a newer name competing against incumbents with decades of brand recognition, the natural question is how you cut through. The CEO's answer is characteristically direct: make the product answer client scepticism before you do.
"The market is crowded, and clients are right to be sceptical," Myers acknowledged. "They've heard the same promises from a lot of brokers." The differentiation VCG is staking its positioning on is its AI infrastructure, specifically VCG ONE, a trading tool the company describes as analytically individual rather than generic. The system analyses each client's trading patterns, identifies their strengths and their recurring mistakes, and provides continuous feedback. It is not, he is at pains to stress, a chatbot with a rebrand. "AI isn't a feature we added," he said. "It's woven into how the platform thinks."
The question of whether the market is ready for that level of AI integration is one he has clearly considered. His answer is to reframe the risk. "I'd rather be early than late on this one. The brokers who waited to see how AI played out before committing are already behind."
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"Behaviour Changes"
The most specific product claim in the conversation concerns ONE Score, a feature that gives traders a measurable view of their own behaviour over time. According to Myers, the premise is that most trading tools show profit and loss, but traders already know whether they are up or down. What they often lack is visibility into the habits and decision patterns that produced those results.
VCG's internal data show that within 30 days of their first ONE Score report, users show a 40% improvement in stop-loss discipline and a 30% reduction in impulsive trade entries. ONE users also maintain a win rate 8% higher than the platform average. The company notes that results vary.
The logic underpinning the product, as the CEO explains it, is behavioural rather than technical. "When you show someone their own patterns clearly enough, behaviour changes. That's what we built it to do, and that's what we're seeing."
The AI integration is not limited to the client-facing layer. Internally, VCG runs AI across risk management, client analytics and trading operations, processing what the CEO describes as millions of data points per second in real time. He also points to a company-wide training program that he distinguishes from the kind of introductory sessions that are common in the industry. "Every department has been through serious AI training," he said. "Not a workshop. A genuine shift in how the whole company works."
On data protection, the company applies controls that go beyond the standard terms of third-party platforms. Data minimisation, vendor due diligence, access restrictions and human oversight are all cited as part of the framework. "AI should enhance what we do, not introduce new vulnerabilities," he said.
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"The Best Product in the World Doesn't Help a Trader Who Never Finds It"
When asked whether tight spreads, fast execution and a broad product range are sufficient to attract clients in 2026, the CEO's response is blunt. "No. They're the entry ticket, not the differentiator." He argues that every serious broker has those covered, and that clients know it. The battleground has shifted to what happens after an account is opened.
"Does the platform actually help me trade better? Does the company understand what I need, or am I just a number? Is the AI genuinely useful or just a chatbot with a different name?" These are the questions he believes determine whether a broker grows in this decade. The brokers that win, in his view, will be the ones clients recommend to other traders, not because of the price of a trade but because of the quality of the experience.
Alongside the retail platform, VCG is building out a partner infrastructure for introducing brokers, affiliates and other distribution partners. The CEO draws an explicit parallel between the quality of that experience and the quality of the client-facing product. "The best product in the world doesn't help a trader who never finds it," he said.
The philosophy is the same on both sides: frictionless, transparent, genuinely useful. His reasoning is that partners are often the first point of trust a new client encounters, and that a clunky experience on the partner side travels downstream. "When your distribution network believes in what they're selling, everything accelerates."
As for what VCG believes it has built, the CEO is not short of a phrase for it. "The brokerage of the future, live today. That's not a tagline," he said. "It's a description of what we've actually built."
