Investment banking and the modern fintech industry

In 2006 I started working for a major investment bank in Scandinavia. Part of my already intricate role involved strategising new ways to acquire more leads from current sources but more importantly from sources not considered worthy because of their non risk-taking nature.

I started by carefully hand picking a team of professionals who shared the same ambitions and we looked in detail at all techniques being used up to that moment for lead acquisition.

Lead acquisition golden times

It was agreed by everyone that a new way was needed, but in 2008, the global financial crisis left a bitter taste in everyone's mouth and that was going to complicate matters. This new way had to be fresh and simple in its form, also, implementation costs had to be managed wisely so there was a lot of heat while debating the way forward.

We decided to build a platform to publish finance and investment articles. These were written in plain simple words avoiding most of the industry jargon so the average person could make sense of the advice given. We used prominent industry experts for copy writing and up to the minute alerts on market conditions. This platform was multi-lingual to target the different markets the bank operated on. It took a little while to gain traction but in the end it was very effective at lead acquisition and we didn't even do PPC (Google AdWords), it was all organically generated (with great SEO).

This technique was replicated across several regions, inc. China, but it was in Latin America where we enjoyed some of the highest success rates not previously seen in the bank.

To accommodate all the new growth, we also designed and developed from the ground up a new trading platform with ForexTrading.com. Also launched TradingFloor.com and TradingQuarter.com. Lead acquisition was through the roof. These new platforms were modern and appeased to the non-tech savvy but willing to invest crowd.

Around this time the bank was also breaking new ground experimenting with sub $10K accounts, which it had not done before. Good times for everyone involved.

Social trading is born

Soon after (2010) we started discussions on a new way to do trading and social trading was born. We were going to use TradingFloor.com as the prime launching pad and in 2011 we started to see established traders and new comers engaged in trading in ways not possible before.

Nov 2015update

Social trading is now everywhere and for good reason. Most platforms I've seen, employ some form of social trading in them, some more sophisticated than others but it was great to be part in the emergence of such a great and exciting new technology which now totally dominates the industry.