Alpari to Migrate Clients from Cyprus to UK
Alpari has just announced that it has decided to move clients from its Cyprus regulated office to its FSA UK
Alpari has just announced that it has decided to move clients from its Cyprus regulated office to its FSA UK operation. Existing clients will have until February 8th 2013 to either close their accounts or open new account with the UK entity and have funds transferred. In its press release, Daniel Skowronski, Chief Executive Officer, Alpari (UK) commented about the financial benefits for clients after the move. It’s worth noting though, that earlier in the month, it was announced that Alpari’s main shareholder, Andrey Dashin was launching a new Cyprus based broker called ForexTime. At the time, it was written that Alpari’s Nigerian website had been rebranded or sold to become ForexTime. Therefore, after shutting down the Alpari Cyprus operation, it may mean that the office and its employees will become part of the new ForexTime broker.
Alpari to Migrate Clients from Cyprus to UK
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Cyprus, 27 December 2012: The Alpari group of companies, one of the leading global providers of online foreign exchange trading services, has made a strategic decision to migrate clients from its Cyprus based operation, Alpari Financial Services Ltd (AFS) to its UK operation, Alpari (UK) Ltd.
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Daniel Skowronski, Chief Executive Officer, Alpari (UK) Limited, commented that; “the strategic decision to migrate clients is part of Alpari’s drive to realize scalable benefits and to continue to provide the best trading experience for clients. Clients will be able to continue trading on their familiar platform across the same product sets with similar terms and conditions. Additionally, clients of Alpari (UK) will benefit from even greater security; as under the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme their client funds will be protected up to £50,000, a significant improvement on the 20,000 Euros they currently get under AFS. As part of this change Alpari will close its business operations in Cyprus. “
Clients of Alpari Financial Services will have two options:
• open a new account with Alpari UK and have any existing Alpari FS trading credit transferred to the new account; or
• close their account with Alpari FS and withdraw any remaining trading credit.All clients of AFS are being informed directly about these changes and the steps that they need to take in order to continue to trade with Alpari. Clients will have until 8 February 2013 to either transfer their trading credit to Alpari UK or withdraw their trading credit.
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Could be the result of Cyprus’s downgrading by rating agencies…
no, it’s a strategic change, offices and business units consolidation – this process started almost a year ago
It is very strange as news were coming our of Alpari FS that they were doing very good and making money and were spending huge money on Marketing and Advertising. Closing down operations in Cyprus means that they were not profitable, which leads to 2 questions: 1. Why did they come to Cyprus at first place as they already had the UK office with higher clients protection and better regulations as they have mentioned in their email? 2. If as the article suggested that all employees will go to the new broker forex time nigeria, if they failed with an… Read more »
i don’t think Alpari FS ever did very well, surely comparing to the RU and UK units, not sure where you this info from. i believe decision to consolidate and strengthen the group resulted in closing down less performing (cyprus, nz) and problematic (nigeria) subsidiaries. as per your questions: 1. same reason saxo did – cysec is more ‘flexible’ than fsa, things you can do in cyprus you can’t do in uk. also cost of personnel and general expenses in cyprus are substantially lower than in the uk resulting in better profitability and less business risk 2. it came handy… Read more »
Just to add to what Michael said about CySec. Depending on what country you are from, it could be easier to open an account with a CySec regulated firm than at an FSA one. However, Alpari may have realized that the clients they were hoping to attract with the CySec regulation weren’t meaningful or still opted to go with the UK office.
Well, after our discussion it looks to me like separation of business between shareholders…
it is
@James. Fantastic second point. The definition of madness is…
The staff have already been given notice that they will only stay on until March 2013 and were told to use the time to find other employment. Maybe they could have saved some of the money from the glitzy and completely unnessesary “launch party” of their Cyprus office and tried to do some actual business instead. I made similar comments about Alpari before … (a lot of people on this site know this) and I am saying it again … This company is not as healthy as they want people to think they are, they are wasting money like idiots… Read more »
you always had a thing for them.. but fact being is that as much as you diss them – they still are 10 times bigger than your firm, so they must be doing something right
sometimes too much criticism – is too much criticism
Hahaha … We can discuss this in detail when we meet in Macau in a few weeks and then we can finish this conversation after that.
Michael Greenberg said : decision to consolidate and strengthen the group resulted in closing down less performing (cyprus, nz)
Please what do you mean less performing nz? isn’t it most performing unit? and when was it closed down?
you may be right – alpari nz may have stayed under alpari brand, forextime took over some new zealand company, we are checking whether it’s alpari nz or a whole different one
Different one
David Raymond Grant CAMPBELL connected to both companies though
Forextime http://www.business.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/3274608
Alpari NZ
http://www.business.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/2193139
On another note … I also don’t think that Alpari is the only one of the so called “big Boys” that will be shutting down more offices in 2013. Especially some based in Cyprus …
I have spoken to one of the x employees of alpari fs amf he confirmed that many people they hired in alpari fs were the worst people who were useless in other companies. That takes us back to what James and MC said about moving tge same old staff which was made redundant to forextime. One theory is to save time and money looking for better staff. Good luck forextime
it’s actually endemic in cyprus because of lack of employees companies are forced to hire not always the brightest minds, that’s why many bad employees keep moving from one company to another..
Even saxo michael is kind of consolidating. Their cyprus forex trading brand might not be doing at all well.
In general i think the cyprus fs bubble started to leak air and might vurst very soon.
Yes … That’s 100% true. Some positions are especially hard to fill. Sales is the easiest as there are hundreds of people with experience but senior management, risk, dealing and marketing are very hard to come by.
everybody is.. market is tough now. cyprus wasn’t a bubble in a classic sense rather it’s an offshore base for all those looking for lenient regulation, brokers going out of business in cyrpsu are no different than unregulated ones – many of them leave the market unnoticed, cyprus ones we do notice because of regulation. just yesterday cysec announced that impetus fx limited returned its license – otherwise we would have never known
Yes but we are not talking about the small start ups that got washed away for whatever reason but for big companies like Alpari (and others) who rush to open an office in Cyprus with much fanfare only to shut it down little over a year later. These bigger companies should have known better and should have managed better.
agreed
@MC you assume that all regulated brokerages run all their whole operation from Cyprus. Many of them have a small part of it in Cyprus and the duties are carried out in their country of origin.
I do not think the positions are that hard to fill, just that the employers do not invest in their staff. A lot of the brokerages just churn them. It is not that hard to make the transition from sales to risk / dealing room. Just need to invest time in your employees. Saves you alot of money in the long term.
From the offline advertising it was evident they were targeting Cypus based clients and trying to create awareness here. I think they confused having a presence in Cyprus with actually targeting Cypriot based clients. Good luck with that..
“It is not that hard to make the transition from sales to risk / dealing room” i totally disagree
i doubt they invested in offline advertising to target Cypriot clients, we all know there aren’t such. i think this more had to do with creating awareness and maybe rubbing the government making them happy for whatever reason
The local advertising (e.g: at the airport , at local hotels and billboards) was almost exclusively targeting the large Russian expat community in Cyprus. There are thousands of Russians who are based in Cyprus and Alpari wanted to capitalize on the fact that these people already have millions stashed away in Cyprus and that they already know the brand from back in Russia.
@Paul … I don’t assume anything. I know the Cyprus market very well and I have a pretty good idea on the headcounts most companies have or pretend to have in Cyprus. I agree with you that there are people who merely present their companies as based in Cyprus and only have a registered address and local phone number … I would be glad to give you names but I will not post them on a public forum. There are a lot of others though who do have a large headcount in Cyprus (range between 50 to 100 people). Some… Read more »
wrong, the advertising would then have to be exclusively in russian.
Not really … English just makes for a bigger net hoping to catch some other clients as well.
Also:
http://www.alparifs.com/news/2012/06/19/cyprus_russian_festival/
Hi, I also didn’t mean Cypriot Clients, But Cypriot based, like Russians as MC said.
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