Leaprate Exclusive… Skilling, led by CEO Anders Berglund, announced earlier that its new online forex and CFD trading platform is now open to the public.
The company’s trading platform is said to be user-friendly, simple to understand, and aims to be fully accessible to everyone who wants to trade in forex, cryptocurrencies, indices, stocks and commodities, including those with no experience in such trading. In its first phase, Skilling is launching its platform in Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom and Germany.
Skilling offers access to financial instruments through CFDs, a type of derivative instrument. Some of the advantages of CFDs are that they can be traded quickly, are highly accessible, and allow people to earn capital daily, even when the value of a share, currency or commodity falls. Large positions can also be traded with a relatively small amount of capital.
Our mission is to make trading simple and accessible. Unfortunately, many people believe that trading in shares, currencies and commodities is an overly complicated activity. Skilling will increase accessibility to the world’s financial markets by combining a user-friendly trading platform with an innovative approach to customer education that will allow our customers to continuously improve their knowledge and develop as traders. Simply put: we want to ‘Make. Trading. Simple.,’ says CEO, Anders Berglund.
This type of trading always involves a certain amount of risk – but with training, secure systems and innovative, smart trading tools – Skilling will offer everyone the opportunity to trade in shares, currencies and commodities in both bull and bear markets,” Anders Berglund continues.
In an exclusive interview, LeapRate asked Skilling’s CEO, Anders Berglund, about the plans for the future, the trading platform, and what he hopes to achieve with the launch of Skilling.
LR: Hi, Anders, and thank you for joining us today. Can you let our readers know more about the company and the people behind it?
Anders: Thanks for having me. Skilling is still very much at the start of its journey, and we have big plans for the future with many exciting things to come. We currently have a team of almost 40 people, spread over 3 offices – our head office in Cyprus and smaller offices in Malta and Spain. We have initially launched in 4 markets – Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Germany – but soon we’ll be looking at expanding into the rest of Europe.
LR: Speaking about markets and specifically about 2019: how many markets are you planning to expand into this year?
Anders: 2019 will be a very interesting year for us, and I’m confident we’ll localise and start offering our platform in 3 to 5 additional markets by the end of the year.
LR: Let’s talk a bit about the platform, starting with the onboarding.
Anders: We spent many months perfecting our customer journey, looking at it from different perspectives, to ensure it’s smooth, simple, localised, and caters for both beginners and experienced traders. For example, for Norwegian and Swedish customers, we introduced BankID registration, which is something customers in those countries are used. For people who are new to trading, we developed a trade placement tool, called Skilling Trade Assistant, which is designed to guide beginners through the process of placing their first trades.
LR: So it’s beginner-friendly. Could you elaborate?
Anders: It is, and it underlines our company promise to our customers: to make trading simple and accessible for everyone. As a company, we are committed to delivering an unparalleled customer experience, where our customers can feel comfortable with trading in a secure environment. Take a look, for example, at our trading interface: you’ll find that we have optimised many features of day-to-day trading, such as the trade ticket and watchlist to be quick and easy for beginner traders to understand and use. This is just the beginning of our journey, and we have a very ambitious product roadmap for the coming year to further enhance the experience for new traders.
LR: What separates you from the crowd? Why should I use Skilling’s platform?
Anders: Where do I start? Firstly, we’re committed to customer experience excellence and want to be able to offer the industry’s absolute best and most intuitive user experience when it comes to trading. You’ll see it in our platform from onboarding to our client dashboard. We’re easy to use and really user-friendly. Secondly, our pricing strategy focuses on first-time users. Our minimum deposit is only €/£/$50, unlike many of our competitors’ €100-200. We allow our customers to open micro positions with as minimum as one share. Thirdly, we are low on overnight funding fees – especially when you compare us with other more beginner-focused providers. And finally, I believe we’re developing a unique approach to client education, though the tools like the Skilling Trade Assistant, that aims to provide simple to understand, guidance on demand when, and only when, a customer needs it.
LR: You’re the former CEO of Google Sweden. What attracted you to Skilling?
Anders: That’s a really good question. I was working for a few media companies and, eventually, for Google. I was approached by a couple of interesting people that wanted to invest in a truly revolutionary trading business. We started discussing the industry, the customers, and how we can learn from what has been done to create a truly unique trading proposition. So, after a number of lengthy discussions, I saw this as a truly unique opportunity, and decided to put my experience in building companies at different levels of development to good use by accepting a leadership position here at Skilling.
Joining a company at a seed stage was very appealing. I saw a massive opportunity to create a global player in the trading industry with talented multinational teams, dedicated to our quickly emerging company vision and mission.
Being here now just a little over 3 years, I’ve spent a lot of time developing our organisation and our teams. We have many people from the trading industry to make sure our core proposition is in line with expected industry product and compliance standards. But, we also have quite a few people from the other industries, which helps us bring best practices and innovation from other sectors and apply them to trading. It’s a great mix, really.
I’m a firm believer in transparency and fairness for the client – having spent some time at Google, this is the mentality that I firmly believe in. Applying it to an industry that sometimes sees some bad press is an immensely exciting project.
We’re here for the long term, and, all in all, these are the main things that attracted me to Skilling.
LR: What can we expect from Skilling going forward? We already know that you’ll be expanding really soon.
Anders: We’ll start growing the team, and I think we’ll have twice as many people in the near future. You’ll indeed see our brand appearing in new markets in Europe, but we’ll start rolling out platform improvements and adding new features very soon. We have just started working on our brand & creative strategies to transform our product vision into external brand platform – so you’ll see Skilling’s true brand identity emerging very soon as well across Europe.
So quite a few things, but in one sentence: it will be a combination of talent acquisition, new market launches and product improvements.