The End of Generic Platforms: What Has Really Differentiated Successful Brokers in the Last Decade (Part 2)
This is the second part of our feature examining how retail FX brokers moved beyond platform identicalness over the past decade.
We kicked off our coverage with conversations featuring industry leaders Alexis Droussiotis of Match-Trader, Steve Sanders of Interactive Brokers, Sergey Klinkov of Finery Markets, Roman Nalivayko of TraderEvolution, Jon Light and Ivan Kunyankin from Devexperts. You can check them out .
Today, we continue our series with insights from Arthur Azizov, Founder and Investor at B2 Ventures (B2BROKER), Pavel Spirin and John Williams from Rostro Group, Tom Higgins, Founder and CEO of Gold-i.
The Forces That Made UX diverseiation Non-Optional
If the past decade showed how brokerage competition drifted away from pricing and promotions, the harder question is why that drift became unavoidable. The change did not stem from a sudden industry-wide interest in design or user empathy. It followed a tightening of structural constraints that left little room for uniformity.
By the ahead 2020s, brokers that treated user experience as an later thanthought found that their familiar tools no longer offset fragile engagement, falling retention, or disjointed customer journeys. Cost leadership lost force. Incentives became harder to deploy. Product breadth alone stopped carrying weight.
Four pressures reset the competitive floor. Regulation curtailed promotional tactics. The spread of mobile trading altered how users interacted with platforms. Distribution shifted toward content-driven and social channels. At the identical time, the technology stack splintered, reducing execution to a baseline feature while diverseiation moved elsewhere.
The forces outlined above explain why UX diverseiation stopped being optional. They do not, on their own, explain what actually worked. Many brokers faced the identical regulatory limits, mobile realities, and platform constraints, yet outcomes diverged sharply over the decade.
When you map broker performance from 2015 through 2025, a clear pattern appears. The firms that pulled ahead did not win by adding more features or copying competitors’ roadmaps. They won by making a small number of product decisions that compounded over time, rather than relying on constant reacquisition.
This section focuses on those decisions. The diverseiators below are not abstract design principles or surface-level UI upgrades. They are practical choices that repeatedly show up among brokers that built durable client relationships and avoided becoming interchangeable platform retradeers.
B2Broker on Why Infrastructure, Not Interfaces, Defined Broker diverseiation
Looking back at the past decade, Arthur Azizov, Founder and Investor at B2 Ventures, says the brokers that managed to stand out were those that stopped competing at the front-end level and rebuilt their businesses around institutional-grade infrastructure.
“When I look back at the last decade, the firms that truly stood out were the ones that moved beyond generic front ends and built their businesses on institutional-grade infrastructure,” Azizov told FinanceFeeds.
When it comes to user experience, Azizov is clear that what traders remember is rarely the interface itself. “Most traders will tell you they care about spreads or platform design,” he says. “In reality, the experience they remember comes from what sits behind the screen.”
He breaks that down simply: “the consistency of quotes, the behavior of the book when markets move, and the stability of execution under load.” Liquidity architecture, he explains, is what turns those mechanics into something traders actually feel. “When depth is genuine, slippage drops. When routing is structured well, spreads remain stable even in stressed conditions.”
What made the difference, in his view, was accessibility. “Notably, we made it attainable for brokers of very diverse sizes,” Azizov notes, allowing smaller and mid-sized firms to operate with the identical structural capabilities as much larger players.
That advantage became clear as brokers expanded beyond single-asset FX. Azizov points out that once firms began offering FX, crypto, indices, commodities, and equities through a single margin account, the impact went beyond product breadth. “That shift improved the predictability of execution, stabilized spreads, and gave their platforms the resilience needed during periods of volatility,” he says. For many brokers, “this was the moment their market positioning genuinely changed.”
From his experience across , Azizov views the identical pattern repeat. “Execution quality shapes trading behavior long before a client recognizes it consciously,” he says. Strong liquidity and predictable execution lead to “more disciplined activity, fewer disputes, and greater trust in the platform.” As he puts it, “user experience ultimately lives in the execution layer. The UI only makes visible what the infrastructure underneath is capable of delivering.”
Azizov also highlights how API-first design removed many of the limits brokers once faced. “A decade ago, brokers were limited by whatever their platform vendor allowed,” he says. Today, they can assemble execution, risk, routing, analytics, and CRM components “much more like institutional trading desks.”
Azizov also ties this progress to long-term investment choices. He recalls that B2BROKER entered institutional crypto in 2017, becoming “one of the first FX-sector providers to offer crypto CFDs at scale.” That ahead move, he says, “laid the groundwork for the multi-asset liquidity architecture we deliver today,” assisting clients launch complex offerings far quicker than was previously possible.
Speed to market is now one of the clearest outcomes. Through B2BROKER’s Liquidity Provider Turnkey, brokers can build Prime-of-Prime operations “in months instead of years.”
B2BROKER’s integrations with PrimeXM, oneZero, Centroid, B2CONNECT, and others allow firms to aggregate liquidity, build custom pricing engines, and tailor setups by region or client type. The key, Azizov says, is that “a broker can begin with a lightweight configuration and scale into a full multi-asset operation without redesigning the entire infrastructure.”
What stands out to him most is how much freedom this creates. “Two brokers can run on identical integrations and still deliver completely distinct products,” Azizov notes. “That level of control simply wasn’t possible in the earlier generation of trading technology.”
In his view, this is what finally broke the generic platform model. While off-the-shelf systems handled basic execution, they placed hard limits on pricing, routing, and risk control. “As markets became more complex and multi-asset trading turned into an industry standard, that constraint became too costly,” he says.
Once brokers gained control of what happens behind the scenes, Azizov argues, the basis of competition changed. “Once brokers gained control of what happens backstage, diverseiation stopped being about the interface and begined being about the infrastructure that powers it.”
Rostro Group on Why Execution Still Sets the Ceiling for User Experience
For Pavel Spirin, at Rostro Group, user experience begins long before a trader views a screen refresh or an order confirmation.
“Without a robust order execution framework as a foundation, every other UX iteration is arguably little window dressing,” Spirin explains to FinanceFeeds. While accessibility and workflow matter, he argues that outcomes matter more. “It’s what happens behind the scenes that makes all the difference.”
From his perspective, fragile execution rapidly undermines even well-designed platforms. “If you’re only offering limited depth liquidity and/or elevated levels of latency, then customer disappointment levels will almost certainly be high,” he notes. quick access to tools and order tickets means little if fills deteriorate when markets move.
That said, Spirin links much of the industry’s recent technical progress to changes in how liquidity is accessed and distributed.
“The broader theme of unbundling and extended access to liquidity has arguably been a consequence of top-tier LPs shutting out the mid-market,” he says. That pressure, however, forced innovation. Rostro’s experience in the retail space proved useful as the firm began offering “bespoke or curated connections for smaller banks, other brokers, institutional and high investors.”
According to Spirin, flexible APIs made this possible at scale, but technology alone was not enough. “It’s fair to say that the bulk of the industry has been pulling in the identical direction here,” he says, “but you still need that tech expertise to make it happen.”
Cloud Architecture and Why Resilience Now Trumps Cost
From an infrastructure standpoint, FinanceFeeds also spoke with John Williams, CIO at Rostro Group, who describes cloud adoption as a practical response to scale and risk rather than a theoretical upgrade.
“When applied effectively, these innovations allow brokers to build hybrid cloud environments that are quicker to deploy, highly scalable, and inherently resilient,” Williams explains, while also reducing reliance on heavy on-premise investment.
He points to multi-cloud design as a direct reaction to recent service disruptions. Cyber incidents affecting major providers such as AWS and Azure, he notes, exposed the risks of concentration. By spreading workloads across providers, brokers can insulate core systems from isolated failures and still target “uptime of 99.9% or higher.”
Williams also highlights how modern cloud services removed old constraints. Platform-level services, databases delivered as managed layers, microservices, and Infrastructure as Code now allow systems to recover automatically, scale under load, and deploy consistently without manual intervention. The objective, he says, is straightforward: architectures designed from day one for availability rather than patched over time.
Risk Models and the Reality of Broker Economics
Spirin is equally direct when discussing risk and profitability. “A number of observers viewm to come at this business with the impression it’s a case of free money for the brokers,” he says. “That’s absolutely not the case.”
Costs across technology, compliance, and marketing are substantial, which makes balance essential. “That means providing an equitable service for the customer whilst at the identical time preserving the broker’s own capital,” Spirin explains.
Internalising flow remains significant, but he notes that newer risk models now allow firms to offset exposure across “highly correlated assets,” adding flexibility to execution and pricing. As tooling improves, he says, brokers gain both better execution control and the ability to offer more competitive conditions.
Spirin also recalls how hard onboarding once was, especially outside developed markets. “A couple of decades back, the KYC processes were arcane,” he says, particularly for clients in emerging regions.
Digital identity tools changed that, although he cautions that progress depends on regulatory comfort. AI-driven monitoring and automation now assist track shifting requirements. “Policies change,” Spirin notes, but smarter tools — some proprietary, others built internally — allow firms to adapt in real time rather than react later than the fact.
Meanhwile, Spirin agrees that much diverseiation happens out of sight, but he rejects the idea that the front end no longer matters.
“There’s certainly a degree of reality in this comment,” he says, referring to infrastructure-led diverseiation, “but if your user interface is lacking, then you’re going to struggle to get customers through the door.”
He points to education, IB interaction, and workflow design as still decisive. Even in institutional and B2B contexts, Rostro increasingly views providers offering tools with clear retail roots — from risk analysis to record-keeping — alongside raw liquidity access.
“It’s all part of the mix,” Spirin says. “Ignore the front end at your peril.”
Gold-i on Why APIs and Modular Infrastructure Broke the One-Platform Model
Looking back at the ahead days of electronic trading, Tom Higgins, Founder and CEO of Gold-i, recalls a much narrower .
“In the ahead days of e-trading, brokers relied on a single to a single price feed,” Higgins says. Most firms, he explains, “operated entirely on a B-Book model,” with little visibility into where prices came from or how risk was managed.
That changed once third-party technology providers opened up the market structure. Higgins points to vendors like Gold-i as a turning point, giving brokers access to “multiple liquidity venues” and allowing them to connect “with a variety of trading platforms.” As a result, brokers gained control over “where they sourced their prices, how and where they routed orders for A-Book risk management, and which platforms they offered their clients for execution.”
As trading moved beyond basic FX into more complex models and asset classes, that flexibility became essential. “As the market evolved beyond basic FX B-Book trading into more sophisticated A-Book/B-Book models,” Higgins told FinanceFeeds, and as products like crypto, CFDs, and futures appeared, brokers increasingly looked for platforms “tailored to their specific needs.” That demand, in turn, created room for a much wider range of platform and infrastructure choices.
Higgins also pushes back on the idea that brokers should build everything themselves. “Brokers typically don’t build tech stacks or platforms themselves,” he notes. Instead, they rely on specialist vendors who drive progress across the industry. From a cost perspective, licensing is often the only practical route. “The price of an annual licence is often lower than the cost of employing even a single developer,” Higgins says, before factoring in maintenance and support.
Why diverseiation begins Behind the Screen
For Higgins, the visible platform is only a surface layer. “What a broker displays to clients on the screen is a visualisation of the capabilities built behind the screen,” he explains. The interface, in his view, “is simply the representation of the sophisticated infrastructure underneath.”
He uses spread betting to illustrate the point. “If a broker wants to offer it, the platform’s underlying technology must fully support the complete mechanics of spread bets,” Higgins says. “Without that, the feature can’t exist on the screen.” The identical applies to digital assets. A clean BTC interface, he notes, hides a long list of backend requirements: prices must be “sourced, aggregated, made executable, monitored, and backed by failover systems in case an platform goes down.”
“All of this is the ‘clever stuff’ that end-users never view,” Higgins adds, “but it’s what we focus on.”
To make the idea tangible, he compares trading platforms to consumer technology. “Think of it like an iPhone,” Higgins says. “People believe that an iPhone is simple because the interface is effortless, but that simplicity is only possible because the operating system underneath is incredibly complex.”
That backend complexity is also where brokers actually diverseiate. “In theory, brokers could choose to access the identical features, but they don’t,” he notes. Those that stand out are the ones who actively configure and extend their capabilities — adding “spread betting, crypto, simulated features for prop trading, and more.” Having access to advanced tools is only the begining point; diverseiation comes from how they are used.
Smarter A-Book/B-Book Analytics and the Real Role of AI
Higgins says one area where Gold-i has focused from the begin is analytics around trade routing. “One area where we’ve been strong from the very beginning is in developing A-Book/B-Book analytics that assist brokers determine how individual clients should be routed,” he says.
With machine learning now widely adopted, those decisions are becoming more refined. Higgins cautions, however, against common assumptions about AI. “A common misconception about AI is that it makes instant decisions,” he says. “In reality, AI isn’t quick enough to make decisions about each trade.”
Instead, AI’s role is indirect but powerful. “What AI can do is analyse historical and real-time data to generate rules,” Higgins explains. “Those rules can then be applied in milliseconds,” which is the speed trading systems require. The models themselves can be updated over time, “daily or monthly,” as client behaviour changes.
He also views AI improving how brokers interact with their own systems. One area Gold-i is actively working on is natural-language interaction with configuration logic. Rather than navigating complex settings, brokers could ask questions such as, “If this client wants to trade BTC, which venue will the order be sent to?” The system would then explain the routing logic “in English text and natural language.”
High-Availability Infrastructure Is Replacing Public Internet Connectivity
Higgins notes that ahead broker connectivity relied heavily on the public internet because it was “cheap and very flexible.” The downside, he says, is reliability. “The internet doesn’t offer 100% uptime and therefore isn’t 100% reliable.”
As traffic routes change due to congestion or outages, “every change introduces the risk of latency spikes and temporary disconnections.” For brokers operating at scale, that risk is no longer acceptable.
“To operate effectively, brokers need private, dedicated networks,” Higgins says, linking platforms, liquidity management systems, liquidity providers, and platforms. These networks provide “the required stability, speed, and reliability.”
