"Brokers Should Engage with Us Now”: TipRanks' Enterprise Head on New MT5 Plugin

Brokers, nowadays, are not only providing trading services but several other add-ons. There are several third parties offering these added services, but ease of integration is a major factor for brokers when it comes to choosing a service. TipRanks is hitting this pain point with its new MetaTrader plugin.

TipRanks, a provider of institution-grade data and research tools to retail investors, has now developed a plugin for the MetaTrader trading platform. The plugin provides access to TipRank's stock screener tool with recommendations from analysts. CFI has become the first broker to incorporate TipRanks via MetaTrader.

Finance Magnates recently spoke with Joseph Craven, TipRanks' Global Head of Enterprise Solutions, to learn more about the plugin and other offerings of the company.

TipRanks’ New MetaTrader Plugin

Craven pointed out that TipRanks' plugin is now available under the Expert Advisors area of the MetaTrader platform, easing its integration for any brokerage platform. Although CFI has become the first to implement it with exclusivity for the time being, the plugin will be ready for other brokers soon.

“It's open for every broker to engage in conversations with us now,” Craven said on the new plugin. "We built it in such a manner so that there was a minimal amount of technological effort and development effort by the brokers so that they could commercialize the product pretty much immediately as they launch."

The data provided under the plugin is the same as the general offerings of TipRanks. Meaning it will display complex stock research datasets in an easy-to-understand format. It will also include analysts' price targets, implied upsides or downsides, and an analyst rating consensus.

TipRanks' clients include over 100 banks and brokerages spread across the globe, including the US, Canada, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, England, Germany and Spain. Recently, it entered the Japanese market with a partnership with Rakuten. It also has a presence in the Chinese market with its partnership with the Hong Kong subsidiary of Futu.

TipRanks is specifically targeting the brokers offering stock trading. Although it has some big-ticket partnerships, it focuses on onboarding smaller brokers, which offer a few hundred stocks.

"We're really disrupting the research space," Craven expressed. "There's been an increased appetite for stocks, but where's the stock research? And that's where TipRanks comes along." He additionally revealed that TipRanks is “working on releasing Hong Kong stocks, and that's gonna come out very soon.”

Although there is no timeline for the launch of research on Hong Kong stocks, Craven estimates that it could hit the market at some time in the first quarter of 2024.

A Customizable Product

The new MetaTrader plugin of TipRanks is further customizable, as Craven elaborated: "We can customize it so that it has some logo of the individual broker and also help them to customize some of the UI. We have a professional services team at TipRanks, comprised of UI UX specialists, and we'll be happy to make them available. And, of course, this is just one example, depending on the level of sophistication that the broker wants."

"We can add more tools and continue adding more data sets to this, so it doesn't have to look so homogeneous; it can look and feel slightly different," he added. "If brokers want, they can have the off-the-shelf version. It will be much more reasonable because it's already been developed. They can also have something customized, which will involve a few additional fees due to customization. We're all about creating synergy with brokers and their users."

Also, the TipRanks plugin is completely synchronized with the offerings of any broker – if the broker offers 500 stocks, it will show the research for 500 stocks; if it provides 5,000 stocks, it will match that number.

It is to be noted that TipRanks did not partner with MetaTrader to develop the plugin. MetaQuotes, the developer of MetaTrader, allows any third party to leverage tools of its library and develop plugins seamlessly.

A MetaTrader 5 Plugin

However, the plugin is only available for MetaTrader 5 at the moment. Although MetaQuotes is pushing MT5 over MT4, the legacy MT4 is still very popular. MT4 still captures most of the market regarding forex and contracts for differences (CFDs) trading. 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.

"We've developed this particular plugin for MetaTrader 5. We do have the MetaTrader 4, but it hasn't been launched yet. We're in the process of developing it," Craven added.

With the plugin, TipRanks dramatically expanded its targeted market. Although its services can be integrated into any trading platform, the sheer number of brokers using MetaTrader will open up a wide market for its stock research tools.

"There's got to be 1,500 small brokers," Craven said. "They probably cover a hundred or five hundred stocks each, and FX is their main business. But, they probably think of providing data about those limited stocks and increasing the engagement on those."

Speaking on the ways to measure the performance of the TipRanks plugin, Craven revealed that although there is no official metric on this he thinks that the number of retail brokers using it might be a critical parameter.

"When TipRanks is integrated, there is a dramatic increase in engagement and trading volume in the stock product. So my gauge of success would be that brokers out there who are potentially looking at stocks and thinking maybe I should be involved in stocks, start coming to us and integrating us," he added.

Expanding Though Acquisitions

Earlier this year, TipRanks acquired The Fly, a New Jersey-based digital publisher of financial news that has been in existence since 1998. That acquisition turned out to be strategic, as the two continue to operate independently.

"The Fly is a fantastic brand in itself. So, we operate as two separate companies under the same umbrella. We didn't want to change the branding of The Fly, but a lot of The Fly content is available [on] our platform. When dealing with large brokers and banks, we are working in synchronicity with The Fly to sell The Fly's market intelligence, breaking news, etc., as an add-on to TipRanks's content," he added. "There's been a huge interest in The Fly's breaking news, as they are the fastest on releasing market updates on a single stock."

"It was a very exciting acquisition by TipRanks," Craven said. "Now we have analysts market intelligence, we have a lot of information on what the hedge funds are doing, what the corporate insiders are doing, the boards of directors. And now we have the fastest breaking news, too."