Sector: Forex and financial services · Platform: isCT
The challenge
Safeguarding client funds is a critical regulation for forex brokers and organisations across UK financial markets. For Foreign Currency Direct, any new system had to manage safeguarding posting and reporting accurately and easily, from trading through to finance.
Their trading processes were largely manual, and the existing trading system was slow and unable to support increasing activity. Client onboarding took a long time, and because processes were mostly manual, a lot of duplication was needed just to be sure compliance had been fully checked.
The company needed a solution that:
- Automated and streamlined their trading processes
- Was flexible enough to support continued growth
- Improved the experience for clients and staff
- Managed the safeguarding of client funds, with automatic posting and reporting
The solution
Foreign Currency Direct migrated to Impress Solutions’ isCT platform.
This brought the whole department — front, middle and back office — together with the finance teams in one seamless, paperless system, with tasks and confirmations automated and issued both internally and externally.
Impress also implemented its digital web platform so Foreign Currency Direct’s private clients could execute trades themselves.
The results
Improved payment processes let the company automate manual work and increase efficiency, while the safeguarding obligations that had been consuming compliance time were handled by the system.
The company could increase payment capacity considerably, remove administration from the front-office team and adapt its processes as the market changed.
“As the business has evolved, the flexibility and understanding from Michael and the Impress team has meant we have been able to adapt systems and processes to meet the changing requirements of our clients, partners and the regulatory environment in which we operate. In particular, we have innovative and robust modules to help automate processes such as safeguarding client funds and providing clear controls over our payment processes.”
— Tom Higham, Managing Director, Foreign Currency Direct
What came next
The web platform was set to expand from private to corporate clients, with Open Banking and Straight Through Processing — covering booking, payment and automatic bank reconciliation — planned through isCT.
The experience
“Impress Solutions’ development work is delivered promptly and support queries are picked up by the team and often resolved on the first call. For larger projects and deployments, we have also benefited from the out-of-hours support offered by the Impress Solutions team.”
— Tom Higham, Managing Director, Foreign Currency Direct