AxiCorp FY18 year in review
The end of the Financial Year presents an opportunity to reflect on what’s been achieved in the previous twelve months. So, while we’ve been in the thick of all the number crunching, we wanted to share some quick highlights and reflections from the past year from an AxiCorp perspective.
Business
In summary, we’ve had a strong year, hitting a CAGR growth rate of 37%, surpassing $1.5 trillion in trading volume, and serving more than 30,000 active traders in more than 100 different countries. This meant the business was up on all the fundamental metrics, so everything else flowed nicely.
Expansion
If there was a one-word theme for our past year it would probably be “Growth”. Axi’s global footprint expanded significantly as we opened new offices in Shanghai, Singapore, Philippines, and Cyprus – not to mention moving our Dubai team to a new location where we’re running our Middle East ops under a new DFSA license. Helping finish the FY on a high, we received confirmation that our official FMA license was granted in New Zealand – plus we’ve got an additional license application pending in another region which we’re very excited about. Gaining approval for licenses in different jurisdictions is a long and challenging process, so acquiring them is a testament to AxiCorp’s track record and reputation around the world.
All of this puts the company in a very strong position and we expect significant growth in the coming year as the teams in these new regions start to get more of a footing in their local markets.
People
With the opening of all our new offices around the world, we’ve welcomed entire teams of new people, making it one of the most significant years of personnel expansion in the company’s history – a great milestone in itself!
There’s so much happening that it’s hard to address individually, so we’ll sum it up by saying how wonderful it is to see how our teams in these new regions have taken Axi to heart and are doing a great job representing the company in innovative ways and with a real local feel. It can be a big challenge to build multiple teams from scratch, so we’re lucky to have recruited so many great people with the right skills and personalities.
At a management level, longtime Chief Financial Officer Simon Hodgkiss has moved into the newly created role of Chief Risk Officer. Given the significant changes in the regulatory environment across our industry (and beyond), this is a critical position for the business so we’re both fortunate and grateful to have an experienced head willing to take it on. The CFO role has been taken up by Patrick Salis who joins us with direct experience in similar roles and a deep understanding of the industry, making him the ideal person to help us with our growth ambitions. Commensurate with our increase in employees worldwide, Louise DeMarco has joined as our Global Head of Human Resources, bringing over two decades of leadership experience overseeing human resources for global companies during critical periods of their strategic transformation.
Technology
As an online business, technology underpins everything we do. From the trading platforms to communication networks to payment providers, right down to the experience people get when they visit our website, we invest a lot in ensuring we have the best tech mix.
The most noteworthy investment we made over the past FY was in PsyQuation. This is a unique product that uses AI and Machine Learning to help our clients become better traders – think of it as a trading robo-coach for our clients. It's an extremely comprehensive product, conceived and built by a team with deep domain expertise in mathematics, psychology, and behavioural finance. While it’s still very early days for PsyQuation, the initial appetite and positive word of mouth from traders are very encouraging.
Products and Projects
As we’ve been branching out across the world we’ve been gradually expanding the number of tradable products on offer, with two of the most significant additions – Cash CFDs and Cryptocurrency CFDs – getting plenty of interest.
Other major projects we got through in the past twelve months include a fundamental overhaul of the AxiTrader client onboarding process which bore immediate fruit, more comprehensive integration between our CRM and SalesForce which boosted our marketing capabilities, significant updates to our Client Portal for increased customer self serve, integrating a host of new payment providers and the official (re)launch of AxiForex.
Suffice it to say it’s been a busy year and one that everyone at Axi can be very proud of!
