Chrysanthos Kattimeris: AI and cloud have helped Trading Point improve scalability and security

Chrysanthos Kattimeris, Chief Technology Advisor at Trading Point, talks about how the company has gone from a local startup to a global trading platform provider, and how its move to AWS cloud has helped improve scalability and security, reduce expenses, and increase agility in driving innovation. He also reveals that Trading Point is already leveraging AI technologies extensively. “These applications help us ensure security, improve customer interactions and enhance overall risk assessment.”

What is your company’s business strategy and goals?

Trading Point is a financial services provider offering world-class brokerage products to meet the needs of modern traders. Founded by industry experts, the business powers numerous innovative financial brands, including XM and Trading.com, serving more than 10 million clients in 30 languages.

Our core focus is on providing exceptional customer service through cutting-edge technology and a commitment to transparency and integrity. We strive to offer competitive pricing and flexible product options that cater to diverse market demands. By leveraging our expertise and resources across multiple regions, we aim to deliver sustainable growth for both clients and shareholders.

How does your digital strategy help you achieve your business goals?

At Trading Point, our digital strategy involves leveraging advanced technologies such as AWS to drive efficiency, scalability, and cost savings. This allows us to create a seamless user experience for our clients across different geographies and devices.

By embracing the cloud and utilising machine learning algorithms, we can optimise our systems and processes to better serve our growing client base. Additionally, our use of big data analytics helps us gain valuable insights into market trends and preferences, enabling us to make informed decisions that benefit our business and clients.

You’re using AWS cloud services. Why did you decide to move to cloud?

Our decision to adopt AWS cloud services stemmed from our desire to enhance various aspects of our business operations. Specifically, we sought improved scalability and security, reduced expenses, and increased agility in driving innovation.

Moreover, with ambitious growth plans to extend the Trading.com brand across international borders, particularly into the United States, we required a versatile, cloud-enabled architecture capable of supporting rapid scaling, ensuring top-notch uptime, and minimising response times for our customers.

What are the main benefits from cloud these days? Scalability? Innovation? Speed? Security? Or is it still mainly about cost optimisation and cost savings?

At Trading Point, we recognise the importance of scalability, innovation, speed, and security in our digital strategy. By leveraging AWS, we can easily scale up or down based on fluctuating demand levels, ensuring optimal performance and minimal disruptions for our clients. Moreover, our team of more than 400 software developers can swiftly roll out new features and functionalities without having to worry about managing complex infrastructure components themselves. And since AWS provides infrastructure in key locations globally, we can ensure that our clients receive fast and reliable access to our platforms regardless of their physical location. Another benefit is extensibility. It’s way easier to extend your systems when there is integration between the variety of services from AWS and our internal services.

Currently, we’re using several AWS services to power our operations and deliver exceptional experiences to our clients around the globe. Our core deployment service comes courtesy of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which streamlines the management of containerised applications while providing robust scaling capabilities. We complement this with Amazon Redshift for data analytics and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for secure storage of critical information. These tools help us achieve unparalleled reliability, scalability, and security, ultimately benefiting both our internal operations and external stakeholders.

You’ve grown from a local start-up to a global trading platform provider. Do you think it’s possible to do that without cloud computing these days?

While it may be theoretically possible to grow from a local startup to a global trading platform provider without cloud computing, doing so would likely require significant investment in traditional IT infrastructure and staffing resources. Without the scalability, automation, and elasticity provided by cloud computing, building and maintaining the necessary infrastructure to support millions of users worldwide could prove challenging and expensive.

Furthermore, cloud computing offers numerous advantages beyond mere scalability, including improved collaboration between teams spread across different countries, faster development cycles through DevOps practices, and increased resilience against cyber threats. Therefore, even if it might be feasible to operate without cloud computing, doing so would likely impede Trading Point's ability to compete effectively in today's dynamic markets.

Today everyone talks about AI – are you using or planning to use some AI technologies?

We are already leveraging AI technologies extensively. Our current implementations include AI for fraud detection, client acquisition and retention, client segmentation and risk management.

These applications help us ensure security, improve customer interactions and enhance overall risk assessment.

Moving forward, we 're committed to staying at the forefront of technological innovation; our roadmap includes continuous research into cutting-edge AI technologies to drive advancements to the aforementioned areas and beyond.

We are dedicated to pushing the boundaries of existing AI tools while exploring new frontiers to provide even more effective and efficient solutions for our clients.

AWS is a global leading cloud provider. But they are not like any traditional IT company that has a large sales organisation everywhere they operate. Instead they make it easy for any company to access their services over the Internet and they try to lower the prices for their customers. How would you rate their enterprise support? Is there a team in Greece or Cyprus that supports customers like Trading Point?

AWS has dedicated teams serving customers in Greece and Cyprus. These teams consist of highly skilled professionals who provide comprehensive assistance to businesses like ours, helping us optimise their use of AWS services and maximise value derived from the cloud. Whether via phone calls, live chats, or personalised workshops, the AWS team works closely with customers to address any questions or concerns they may encounter along the way. We have a daily chat with them. In case we need something, we just give them a call and they will be there in no time to help and resolve our issue. This collaborative approach fosters strong relationships built upon trust and mutual understanding, enabling customers to confidently leverage AWS technologies to drive meaningful impact.

A few years ago, many companies had concerns about data security in cloud. Nowadays more companies migrate to cloud to be more secured. Do you also feel it’s safer to be in the cloud than using your own IT infrastructure?

AWS offers advanced security measures designed to protect customer data and systems from unauthorised access and malicious attacks. With expertise in securing vast networks and handling sensitive information, they implement cutting-edge encryption algorithms, multi-factor authentication protocols, and intrusion detection/prevention mechanisms that often exceed what most organisations can manage independently.

Additionally, regular audits and certifications validate adherence to industry standards and best practices, further bolstering confidence in the safety of cloud environments. Moreover, we have Chaos engineering which promotes innovation by identifying design and structural flaws in the systems.

Some of the benefits of Chaos Engineering includes improvement of system resilience and availability, improved failure recovery and increased customer satisfaction. Ultimately, moving to the cloud enables organisations to benefit from specialised knowledge and technology focused solely on safeguarding valuable assets entrusted to the vendor's care.

Tell us a bit about the future. What are your global expansion plans for the next few years? Are you planning any new services for your customers?

At Trading Point, we remain committed to innovating and expanding our product portfolio to better serve our growing client base around the world.

Over the coming months, we intend to introduce exciting new features and enhancements tailored specifically to meet evolving market demands. By leveraging emerging technologies and staying ahead of trends shaping financial markets, we aim to empower traders globally with powerful tools and insights needed to succeed in volatile economic conditions.

As such, look forward to hearing more news from Trading Point soon!