How Financial Services Companies are Losing Customers with a Slow Website

When it comes to the online presence of financial services companies, little is more essential than a good website. While much has been said about web design and good copywriting, fewer people talk about Hosting Hosting Hosting refers to the location of a broker’s technology stack. This is one of the most crucial elements of a brokerage that helps prevent the company from losing money due to being unable to mitigate latency risks.Brokers or exchanges are traditionally very vulnerable to latency arbitrage due to the speed with which financial markets move. The traditional datacenter locations for forex brokers are all centered at Equinix facilities around the globe. What Are the World’s Foremost Data Centers?Since most forex infrastructure is located at a couple of locations globally, it is wise for the broker to co-locate its infrastructure. The industry’s hotspots are London’s LD4 and LD5, New York NY4 and NY5, Tokyo’s TY3 and Hong Kong’s HK1.Hosting services can be handled internally directly with the datacenter or by using one of the available hosting solutions providers servicing the industry. The world’s most advanced data centers offer specialized products that support evolving equipment standards and technology requirements. This is essential for brokers or exchanges, many of which require a blend of physical security and power usage with turnkey relocation services and support globally.In addition to overall speed, such connections are also very helpful in minimizing security threats. Many companies even outside the finance industry prefer to rely on these types of advances hosting services.The advent of cloud hosting has also led to efficiency improvements, especially for execution and operations. This technology also gives banks a greater opportunity to drive out complexity. Hosting through the cloud also helps develop and launch new and bundled products and services, either on a stand-alone basis or in partnership. Hosting refers to the location of a broker’s technology stack. This is one of the most crucial elements of a brokerage that helps prevent the company from losing money due to being unable to mitigate latency risks.Brokers or exchanges are traditionally very vulnerable to latency arbitrage due to the speed with which financial markets move. The traditional datacenter locations for forex brokers are all centered at Equinix facilities around the globe. What Are the World’s Foremost Data Centers?Since most forex infrastructure is located at a couple of locations globally, it is wise for the broker to co-locate its infrastructure. The industry’s hotspots are London’s LD4 and LD5, New York NY4 and NY5, Tokyo’s TY3 and Hong Kong’s HK1.Hosting services can be handled internally directly with the datacenter or by using one of the available hosting solutions providers servicing the industry. The world’s most advanced data centers offer specialized products that support evolving equipment standards and technology requirements. This is essential for brokers or exchanges, many of which require a blend of physical security and power usage with turnkey relocation services and support globally.In addition to overall speed, such connections are also very helpful in minimizing security threats. Many companies even outside the finance industry prefer to rely on these types of advances hosting services.The advent of cloud hosting has also led to efficiency improvements, especially for execution and operations. This technology also gives banks a greater opportunity to drive out complexity. Hosting through the cloud also helps develop and launch new and bundled products and services, either on a stand-alone basis or in partnership. Read this Term and code optimization to ensure visitors to your site have an optimal and fast experience.

With customer acquisition being as expensive as it is, every tenth of a percent a marketer can improve conversion is well worth their time. And so while website speed is generally an IT subject, it would pay off for a marketer to look into the specifics.

Recall a website that after clicking a link loaded instantly. It surprised you and probably made you feel better about the company you were visiting. We see that in the numbers too. The speed of loading of a website has a big influence on conversion rates, general customer experience on your site and even natural search rankings to some degree.

What influences the speed of a site is the coding of the website on the one hand and the speed of the ‘server’ on the other. A website that is well coded uses caching, minimizes page size and asynchronous external JavaScript, to name just a few items. There are plenty of tools to help you identify these issues, Google PageSpeed is just one of them.

When it comes to hosting, a website server generally comes in 4 flavours; Shared, Virtual Private Server (VPS), Dedicated, and Cloud Cloud The cloud or cloud computing helps provides data and applications that can be accessed from nearly any location in the world so long as a stable Internet connection exists. Categorized into three cloud services, cloud computing is segmented into Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). In terms of trading, the versatility of the cloud service allows retail traders the ability to test out new trading strategies, backtest pre-existing concepts performing run time series analysis (or trend analysis), and execute trades in real-time.Advantages of Cloud Computing in TradingAn advantage that stems from cloud computing would be that entities don’t need to construct a data center infrastructure themselves.Instead, entities can conduct trials and perform refinements, and should no solutions pan out then the cloud may be shut down while the payment terminated at the same time. This methodology of renting virtual space and time in cloud tends to be far more appealing than the costs, time, and resources required with constructing hardware and software infrastructures.These also happen to be the exact concept used in SaaS with trading related software.While executing trades via the cloud is an important capability to keep intact, most retail traders are drawn to the cloud for the research, backtesting, and analytics advantages that stem from using the cloud. In forex, traders that use Expert Advisors (EAs) and automated trading software are uploading their solutions onto a broker’s cloud account. The cloud is an ecosystem for multiple industries, sectors, and niches. Its versatility has not been peaked while in trading many retail traders are transitioning to cloud computing as a means to reduce expenditures, optimize efficiency, and maximize available resources. The cloud or cloud computing helps provides data and applications that can be accessed from nearly any location in the world so long as a stable Internet connection exists. Categorized into three cloud services, cloud computing is segmented into Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). In terms of trading, the versatility of the cloud service allows retail traders the ability to test out new trading strategies, backtest pre-existing concepts performing run time series analysis (or trend analysis), and execute trades in real-time.Advantages of Cloud Computing in TradingAn advantage that stems from cloud computing would be that entities don’t need to construct a data center infrastructure themselves.Instead, entities can conduct trials and perform refinements, and should no solutions pan out then the cloud may be shut down while the payment terminated at the same time. This methodology of renting virtual space and time in cloud tends to be far more appealing than the costs, time, and resources required with constructing hardware and software infrastructures.These also happen to be the exact concept used in SaaS with trading related software.While executing trades via the cloud is an important capability to keep intact, most retail traders are drawn to the cloud for the research, backtesting, and analytics advantages that stem from using the cloud. In forex, traders that use Expert Advisors (EAs) and automated trading software are uploading their solutions onto a broker’s cloud account. The cloud is an ecosystem for multiple industries, sectors, and niches. Its versatility has not been peaked while in trading many retail traders are transitioning to cloud computing as a means to reduce expenditures, optimize efficiency, and maximize available resources. Read this Term Hosting. Shared hosting is generally only useful for smaller, non-critical websites, while cloud hosting is usually not a preferred option from an IT perspective, for a regular website. So depending on the use-case, financial services companies typically need a VPS or Dedicated host, with the dedicated host being the more expensive option. For small to mid-sized companies, a good VPS will typically do. Although at the top of the range in terms of cost, Rackspace is an excellent choice for any size company in our opinion.

The computer that hosts your website (the server) is physically located somewhere. If your server is located in Amsterdam, it might not have the fastest connection to users located in China. So just having a good server is only part of the equation, we need to think about the geographical spread of users and realize that not everyone is on super-fast broadband.

This is where a Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes into play. Put ‘on top’ of your web server, these CDNs have servers all over the world close to every user and so they can serve content much faster. These are typically just dumb copies of the website as you have it on your server, updating at a regular time interval or when you make changes on your website. CloudFlare is a good and free (!) option used by a large portion of the internet.

Consider that in a study for Amazon, every 100 millisecond delay in page rendering time resulted in a 1% loss of sales, and that there are plenty of similar findings from other companies. Together, a well coded website, a good server and a CDN on top will deliver your website fast enough so as not to lose valuable potential customers through delays. It might be worth hassling your IT department a bit more.