Back Office Time Management Tips for FX Brokerages

The top 3 ways to save time and increase productivity

There are a lot of ways that inefficiency can cost your forex brokerage time and money. If you don’t have the right tools and systems in place, then employees can end up duplicating each other’s work, which wastes time and, ultimately, cuts into your firm’s profits.

Based on our time in the forex industry and the requests we’ve had from clients, we have a list of three problems that lead to wasted time and inefficiency at forex brokerages. We also have tips to solve those problems with your back office software.

When clients who regularly make deposits and trades stop doing so, you want to encourage them to re-engage. That means you need to send them emails about their activity.

Your back office software probably has reports that can automatically tell you which traders have become inactive, so you can easily generate a list of people to email. However, typing in individual emails to your basic email app is time consuming.

You can use a third-party email app or a forex CRM with a built-in email feature to build lists of recipients that you can email all at once. If your CRM has this feature, you won’t need to export a list from your back office software to a different tool. Instead, you can just tell your back office tool to email all clients who meet the criteria you’ve set to be deemed inactive.

In addition to simply creating email lists, drafting emails that encourage clients to make a trade takes time. If individual brokers are writing emails for their clients, then they’re doing work that someone else has already done.

Both third-party email tools and back office tools will allow you to create templates that any employee can use. Drafting a template allows you to control the message going out from individual brokers and saves time since they won’t need to draft their own content.

When there are dividends on CFDs, you have to pay or charge those dividends to clients. This means manually calculating the position of each client who is long or short on the CFD with the dividend and then issuing a charge or payment to those clients’ accounts one by one.

Doing this individually for each client takes a significant amount of time, and doing it manually leaves room for errors in calculations or simply missing a client altogether. If you don’t pay a client when you should, you could face serious repercussions, and if you don’t charge the appropriate fee when they have short positions, you lose money.

Some back office software for brokerages, like CurrentBusiness, allows you to automate this process. You enter the symbol with the dividend and then the system can automatically calculate positions and issue charges/payments at the time you determine. This dividend automation ensures speed and accuracy.

Brokers, compliance officers, and other employees learn important information whenever they talk to clients. A lead might tell a salesperson that they’re interested in making a deposit after a specific date, or a client might tell their broker they will stop actively trading if don’t get better customer service. If that info isn’t recorded, your sales team or brokers might not follow up with those individuals at a time or in a way that will encourage them to remain loyal to you.

In other cases, when information isn’t documented, employees may have to go back to the client later to get essential details, or they might do work that isn’t necessary.

Set up a system for all employees to make notes on client interactions. Whenever a client comes to a brokerage employee with a problem or change, your employee can help resolve the problem or make the necessary changes. Then, they can also create a note in the system so that all other employees know exactly what happened and when it happened. To save even more time, look for a forex CRM with a note taking feature built in.

Good back office software is essential for any brokerage. It will save you time and increase your productivity, and in the competitive brokerage industry, working efficiently is essential for long term success.

Running a profitable forex brokerage takes a lot of work. Making sure your firm runs as effectively as possible is one way to help make your business profitable. Retaining clients once they’ve made a deposit is another way. Check out our blog post on forex client retention for tips!