Asian Forex Markets

Asian forex markets present extensive growth opportunities to brokerages. According to a recent report from the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA), daily forex volumes traded in Asia have risen 20% since 2013.

However, to access traders in the region, your forex brokerage will have to adapt to a vastly different forex market than the one in Europe. If your forex brokerage is in the process of entering the market in China, Malaysia, or another APAC country there are a few tools you must have.

We have experience working in China, and we have these tips for forex brokers in Asia.

1. Multilingual client portal

Your forex trader’s room or client portal should be available in the languages your clients speak and read most comfortably. If you plan to target the Chinese market, this means your client-facing software should be available in Simplified Chinese.

If your software was created in another language, you’ll need to hire a translator to make sure the translations are accurate. Don’t rely on machine translation; it may create incorrect or misleading translations.

If you’re using a third-party software for your trader’s room, ask that provider about their language options.

The client-facing side of CurrentBusiness is available in 11 languages, and the new version, coming later in 2020, will be even more friendly for international users. Regardless of which software provider you choose, make sure they’ll be able to support your language needs.

2. Multi-level partnership management

The Chinese forex industry involves introducing brokers (IBs) and complex partnerships. To easily integrate with any existing brokerages in China or to attract experienced IBs, you’ll need to have back office software that makes it easy to manage those different partnerships.

Your back office software should account for multiple layers of partnerships, and it should also allow you to set commission payments for different kinds of partners. This means that you will need the ability to create fee groups to apply to each client account in order to apply the fees for each level of partner they’re associated with.

3. Regional payment providers

Because of the way payments are processed in the region, getting money in and out of many countries in Eastern Asia, especially China, can be difficult. You probably won’t be able to use the same payment providers that you’ve used in Europe.

You’ll need to work with regional payment providers and liquidity providers for funding accounts and charging fees. This means you will also need to find software tools that already integrate with those local providers or ones that make it easy to integrate with new providers. Look for back office and forex CRM tools that offer APIs for easy integration to make this process as smooth as possible.

4. Regional hosting

The closer your data centers and servers are to your users, the faster their data will load. To give your clients the high speeds they expect, you’ll need servers in China or Hong Kong.

If you plan to set up your own servers, investigate hosts in the country where you’ll target your marketing efforts. If you’re using a third-party to host your server, ask about where their servers are located.

The Chinese and other Asian markets present both opportunity and challenges to forex brokerages. If you are already working in an APAC country or are interested in entering one of those markets, attending the iFX Asia Expo is an excellent way to learn more about operating in the region.

If you’ve never been to iFX Asia, check out our list of tips for first-time attendees.