World’s First Forex Hackathon

Back in May, Forex Magnates wrote about Tradable, a new platform which is expected to launch in September, and that its founders believe will change “what trading platforms are all about.” At that time, we revealed that the heart of the Tradable platform was its open platform, and that it would work with third party developers to create and facilitate trading technology for brokers and traders, offering a new model to the very fragmented Forex technology space.

The CEO of Tradable, Jannick Malling, told us that what drove his team to create Tradable was that “many innovative products are increasingly coming from the startups rather than the bigger, established players. Small tech firms can execute more rapidly, and adapt quickly to the market in order to find their niche. However, a lot of these companies have a hard time scaling their business.” He added that the biggest obstacle these technology firms face is integrating their products across brokers, existing platforms, and other third party technology providers: “None of these firms want to end up being the one to sort out all the integration hassles among different tech providers that are traditionally required to run a brokerage,” Malling explained.

To provide a solution, Tradable decided to create a trading platform from scratch, that from its onset would be formed to facilitate third party development. With the platform about to launch, Tradable held a Hackathon in New York to promote innovation for its open source platform. The company invited programmers from various industries who worked on ideas for the new platform. The 48 hour event was also attended by the COO of Tumblr Fredrik Nylander, Henrik Werdelin, partner at product incubator PreHype, and Jeremiah Zinn, product manager at Viacom.

The end results were a variety of trading apps including the traditional post trade analysis tool, a virtual betting app, an application that would send a percentage of one’s profits to charity, and even an app that played music based on currency moves. Henrik Werdelin of PreHype gave this take on the event, “When you merge two categories or industries you get a lot of innovation. And I thought, taking all the exciting things we build on the web and apply that to the financial sector was bound to create a lot of cool new stuff.”

[ Authors note: With Tradable set to launch next month, the jury is still out on how the platform works. However, what is very important is the cross development that Tradable is promoting. Having worked with various brokers, traders, etc, one of the biggest gaps within the financial industry is finding developers that understand the products and specialized needs of the financial industry. This is especially important as low latency has become such a huge part of trading. Therefore, such events like a hackathon can go a long way in raising awareness for the Forex industry among the tech world.]