The FCA regulated Retail Forex brokerage market is getting increasingly crowded, with the latest entrant being XM.com.
XM.com, which has been operating as a CySEC regulated company out of Limassol, Cyprus, announced the opening of a London office under a new license granted to the company’s new UK subsidiary Trading Point of Financial Instruments UK Limited.
So who will be running XM.com UK?
Well, nobody new.
Pambos Panayiotou, XM.com
From what the company has disclosed and information in UK regulatory filings it seems as if the management of the Cyprus entity will also be running the UK business. The CEO of the UK office will be Pambos Panayiotou, who has been Executive Director at XM .com the past four years, with CFO Marios Papapostolou holding the same role in the UK company. XM has also added to its UK board Rishi Zaveri, Managing Director of the Financial Institutions Group at Cantor Fitzgerald, as a non executive director.
That is actually different from some of the other international brokers who enter the UK for the first time. We have typically seen those brokers hire experienced London-based executives to grow the UK side of the operation.
That tells us that XM.com, at least for the time being, is aiming to mainly use its new FCA license as a marketing tool to buy more credibility in the eyes of traders, as opposed to growing out a serious UK presence.
The company has clearly invested a lot of time and effort in its new brand ambassador Usain Bolt, as a visit to XM’s home page clearly demonstrates. XM has been a fairly ‘downmarket’ forex broker, attracting clients over time with trading contests and no-deposit bonuses (a practice which may soon be outlawed by CySEC). It remains to be seen if XM can grow things out to a more high net worth and institutional audience with its new FCA license and London office.
The full XM.com press release follows:
Today, 22 of November 2016, XM Group is pleased to announce the commencement of operations of its UK entity XM UK (Trading Point of Financial Instruments UK).
XM UK, situated in what is known as the world’s most known financial center, the City of London, has come as a result of the XM Group’s continuous commitment to being fair and being the broker of choice to all its customer.
During today’s official announcement, Pambos Panayiotou, the CEO of XM UK, commented:
We are proud to announce another milestone to the XM Group’s corporate history, which is of great strategic importance to us and will help to evolve and extend our European operations through the XM brand.
Over the past four years, we have been recording steady double-digit growth, which is considered as an achievement on its own, but we remain humble, focused and dedicated to our values.
We want to ensure that we achieve a healthy growth and we develop at a solid pace, a pace which we can maintain and handle without compromising our values, brand and product.
With the introduction of XM UK, the management wants to demonstrate to its clients that even in this period of great regulatory turbulence it stands behind its values of promoting best practice and working for the clients’ best interests.
Clients domiciled in the UK can feel free to visit our offices situated at Citypoint Building, 1 Ropemaker Street, EC2Y 9HT.