Interview with Your Bourse’s CEO: Let the Pros Take Care of Your IT Infrastructure

Fazzaco: Hi, Andrey, happy to have you at Fazzaco. As a start, please tell us more about yourself.

Andrey: People who've been in the industry for over 20 years usually need no introduction, as we are good friends from the times the industry was very green and fresh. My first enterprise was Alpari Group (FX and CFD's retail brokerage firm). Under my management, Alpari became one of the biggest FX/CFD brokers worldwide with global volumes of more than 200 bn a month. I founded Your Bourse before I exited Alpari, as I realised the industry is in need of a stable yet practical and cost-effective technological solution and that's how Your Bourse was born, I am the founder, CEO and CTO.

Fazzaco: What motivated you to create Your Bourse? And what range of core products do you provide?

Andrey: The realisation that due to legacy issues most top brokers are forced to keep a technological Zoo with outdated technology and extensive technical debt that can't ever be "paid". This issue often holds their performance back. You can't be a guru in all the fields at the same time, hence success lies in correct outsourcing and specialising. My expertise lies in strategy, technology and risk management - it always has been, that's what made Alpari successful. This is also where my passion is at and that's why I want to share my expertise with all brokerages, not just one, anticipating your question why I didn't found another broker.

We really have just one platform - Your Bourse. The platform, however, consists of several components: liquidity aggregator, matching engine, reporting and risk management and MT4 bridge and MT5 gateway. All platform components have an API as well which makes them incredibly flexible and easy to integrate with.

Fazzaco: Your Bourse is a platform-as-a-service, how to interpret PaaS in the forex industry?

Andrey: We want to ensure that our clients benefit from all the features we roll out and not just one or two, thus we offer our platform as a package - one fee for all the features, including the future product releases and updates to the existing ones. For example, when we launched a risk management dashboard, all clients received it without any additional charges.

Fazzaco: COVID has provided a boost to volatility and challenge to risk management. Has the pandemic increased demand for your product offering?

Andrey: It's really hard to say if it's the pandemic or the absence of a similar solution, but the market response has been very positive so far, to the point where we need to slow down client onboarding to ensure the quality of our product stays premier for all of our current and future clients.

Fazzaco: What advice do you have for brokers to manage risk during such extreme volatility times?

Andrey: First and foremost, every broker must have a reliable technological solution. For example, our platform has 7 different spike filters build-in the system to ensure we can cope with the volatility. None of our clients was affected by extreme cases of volatility observed in various markets in the past year.

And my next advice is - reporting, reporting and again reporting. Data analytics on micro and macro levels, client analytics and profiling, big picture reports - all these tools provide information for daily and strategic decisions in times of extreme volatility. Data is always the key.

Fazzaco: Your Bourse acts as a liquidity aggregator, could you tell us the working flow of the aggregator? such as how to manage order flow from brokers etc?

Andrey: As mentioned above, Your Bourse platform is provided on PaaS basis, meaning that we do not separate our liquidity aggregator from other components of the platform. So it makes sense to speak about the order matching workflow of the platform as a whole.

This scheme will help readers understand what I'm about to elaborate on.

The price streams supplied by Liquidity providers are aggregated into Liquidity Pools in the component called Liquidity Manager. After that, each liquidity pool streams the price feeds according to the settings into the matching engine. Thus, clients can use one and the same LP FIX session to feed multiple matching engines or multiple liquidity pools. The matching engine is a unique technology for the FX market allowing clients' limit order (takers) to be aggregated into the Order Book alongside the liquidity provided by LPs (makers). This feature can be turned on and off, depending on the broker's needs and business model. The aggregated price stream is then thrown into MT4 or MT5 server, or aggregated via FIX API. When the bridge receives an order from MT4/MT5 client, the order is being sent into the matching engine with all the respective parameters (A/B-book settings, markups, mappings, hedging settings, etc) and the matching engine checks the recent price update in the aggregated order book to see if the requested price is still available. If it is not, the execution price for a B book order will be adjusted accordingly. An A-book order is then being sent to the LP providing price found on the Top of the Book at that moment. If that LP due to some reason rejects the order, it comes back to the matching engine and then is sent to the LP provisioning the next best price in the order book, and so on. The matching engine will attempt to fill the order for 5 consecutive seconds. If the order is not filled within this time limit, the client will get a rejection. This setting is also fully flexible and can be changed by the broker. Our matching engine supports the Best Execution Policy, which is an essential feature for regulated brokers.

Fazzaco: Low latency is another often discussed topic, in your opinion, what kinds of range belongs to low latency?

Andrey: When it comes to latency benchmarks, we need to understand what type of latency it is. If we are considering the latency between LP and our matching engine, then the benchmark would be 1-2 ms, which is the latency of the physical connection. Our technology does not create any additional latency. The 1-2 ms can only be achieved if the matching engine is located in direct proximity with the LP pricing engine, by cross-connecting the two engines. In this regard, Your Bourse is extremely flexible as our infrastructure is completely decentralised and we deploy an individual instance of the platform for each client in the location that meets their needs. Moreover, the architecture of the platform allows applying all the advanced features, like liquidity aggregation, flexible order routing, etc, without affecting the latency. When we are talking about our internal components, e.g matching engine, our internally accepted maximum latency is 1 nanosecond.

The next step is to make sure the broker's trading server (e.g. MT4 or MT5) is located in the same data center or at least in the same area geographically. At the end of 2020, Your Bourse expanded its service offering by launching MT4 and MT5 hosting solutions that allow us to analyse the latency between the trading server and our platform and optimise the broker's trading infrastructure to achieve the best performance, including reduced overall latency.  

The latency between the trading server and MT4 Data Center (the proxy server that facilitates clients connections to the trading server) is another point of concern. Normally, we recommend choosing DC locations based on the majority of clients' locations. However, the problem of routing, which also affects latency, is often overlooked. How is the DC connecting to the trade server? What providers are used for that connection? How many switches this connection has to go through before it reaches the trade server? All these things must be considered when choosing a hosting provider. For that purpose, we offer FastMT services which consist of detailed client base analysis and provide recommendations for the best DC locations. This service minimises the latency further and provides real-time client connections, monitoring on an ongoing basis.

Providing 360° hosting services for our clients, we have the flexibility of choosing the location and configuration for the client's infrastructure taking into consideration all the above-mentioned parameters to optimise the infrastructure for the best possible speed of connection to be achieved without any hassle for the brokers.

Fazzaco: Your Bourse has introduced new features, such as migration tool, hosting solution for MT4/MT5 brokers, what plans do you have for rolling out new products over the coming months?

Andrey: To be honest we have two big product updates coming this year, which have been used in beta by our key clients. We didn't roll out publicly yet, as we've been continuously working on smaller features needed for our existing clients. The success of our clients is the key to us, this is what we focus on and it's the main driver behind our company.

Hence, whenever we have a new client coming on, we do a full-scope business analytics session. It's a tailor-made process, but before going live, we ensure we tick all the boxes for the new client. It may seem, like a very difficult business model, but we prefer it this way, as at the end of the day all our clients are happy and successful and the key to our success is their success. This has also been the reason why we don't onboard everyone who comes our way.

We'll have to keep the updates a secret for now, but I'll give you a hint: one product is based on the machine learning algorithms and the second one will disturb the institutional liquidity distribution.