Turkish forex market has undergone significant changes in the past twelve months, especially since local regulation was announced. In August last year Turkish financial regulator CMB published its requirements and the move was very aggressive. Turkey was once home to few dozens of forex brokers and many others marketed into Turkey. Turkish traders are considered very active and their percentage in the population is relatively high. All this has come to an end as only regulated brokers were allowed to solicit local clients. Only few licenses however were granted temporarily and new ones aren’t easily issued. For many brokers the only way to enter the market was through acquisition of local brokers with license. CMB’s requirements also required many changes to platforms in use, servers location, liquidity, etc.
As seen in other highly regulated and mature markets regulation paved way for larger and more established firms to enter the market. Today IS Investment enters the market using Integral’s FX Grid. Integral products too have made a large progress in the past year or so and its market share is growing.
ISTANBUL, Turkey, and SUNNYVALE, Calif. (August 28, 2012) – ‘IS Investment’ (www.isinvestment.com), Turkey’s largest investment bank, partnered with Integral Development Corp. (www.integral.com), a leading provider of FX trading solutions and services, to automate its existing margin FX business. The solution includes access to over a dozen bank liquidity providers and a high-performance connection to MetaTrader 4 (MT4). By customizing Integral’s cloud-based technology services to its needs and by sourcing from liquidity providers that were already live on FX Grid®, ‘IS Investment’ was able to go to market in record time and with almost no up-front capital expenditures.
‘IS Investment’ chose Integral because Integral as a technology company allows ‘IS Investment’ full control over its platform, including the ability to configure every detail of its business such as spreads, liquidity provisioning, pricing model and client user experience. ‘IS Investment’ also wanted to follow best-practices by implementing a straight-through-processing (STP) business model, offering to all its customers direct market access through a reliable technology that successfully supports many other FX platforms.
Ilhami Koc, CEO of ‘IS Investment’ said: “Integral helped us deliver great pricing and execution to our margin FX customers, while minimizing risk to our business. Integral’s cloud-based business model, its reliable technology that provides a broker with a hosted end-to-end solution including a fully integrated MT4 bridge, and its ability to get us up and running so quickly, made all the difference.”
He further commented: “Integral’s technology allows us to act as an agency broker on behalf of our retail FX customers, executing all orders directly into the market. Our customers trade in the knowledge that they always get best execution. For us, partnering with Integral translates into less risk and the peace of mind to focus on providing excellent customer service, and on marketing programs to expand our market share.”
Harpal Sandhu, CEO Integral Development Corp., added: “When ‘IS Investment’ had to react quickly to a changing regulatory environment, it developed a clear understanding of what needed to be done to take advantage of the new situation and to maintain its leadership position in the market. We were able to support them every step of the way. Now, we are looking forward to assisting them in growing their business and to a successful partnership between our two firms.”
Integral’s FX Grid® allows FX brokers to customize their own liquidity, aggregation rules and distribution models, without incurring any of the time and costs associated with internally deployed licensed software.
