The global brokerage EXANTE, founded in Malta in 2011 by Alexey Kirienko, Anatoly Knyazev and Gatis Eglitis, continues to grow. With a worldwide client base, licensed to operate in Hong Kong, the UK, Cyprus and Malta, EXANTE remains close to its original solution of providing best-in-class client service and trading opportunities on a single platform. Alexey Kirienko is one of the key figures in the brokerage’s history, providing technical know-how and insights into the product and service requirements of traders from his experience dealing in futures contracts. Kirienko’s background and experience are invaluable to EXANTE’s continued operations, allowing the brokerage to act responsively towards clients who want to work with a broker geared to the real requirements and expectations of traders.
Showing a keen interest in mathematics from an early age, Kirienko gravitated towards the financial markets during his studies at university. Initially seeking a career in the oil and gas sector, Kirienko’s understanding of statistics helped him develop arbitrage trading strategies exploiting inefficiencies in futures prices relative to their underlying assets. As a student, Kirienko was working with sophisticated techniques such as neural networks and correlation analysis, and continued his studies with a masters degree in economics. Throughout the 2000s Kirienko continued to develop complex derivatives trading strategies, experience which would prove invaluable in the later formation of EXANTE. As Kirienko built a name for himself in the world of futures trading, he came into contact with other figures in the world of finance.
It was during this period that Kirienko got to know his future co-founder Anatoly Knyazev. Both sharing a passion for applied mathematics and statistically-demanding trading strategies, they began to develop a list of requirements for a next-generation brokerage to help similar traders. The eventual fruit of these labours was EXANTE, a company born when the two traders began working with Gatis Eglitis, a commercial specialist with extensive experience in business development and product launches. EXANTE was designed from the beginning to fix many of the problems Kirienko has come across during his trading career, focusing on providing a best-in-class experience for their professional clients.
EXANTE initially operated from Malta, swiftly expanding into Cyprus, Hong Kong, and London. These locations give the business a strong local reach in each market, reaching clients from East Asia to the Americas, and also the benefit of regulation by the FCA, SFC and CySec. These listings ensure EXANTE meets some of the most exacting global standards for financial companies, strictly regulating how EXANTE does business. Fully compliant with international standards such as MiFID II, EXANTE’s strong standards of regulatory compliance protect their professional clients. Achieving and maintaining registration with these regulators is a thorough and time-consuming process, involving background checks on staff, strict controls on client money handling, and ensuring the financial viability of the business. Registration in major financial centres such as London and Hong Kong offer unparalleled access to trade able assets, with EXANTE offering more than half a million instruments to clients.
Kirienko plays a vital role in ensuring EXANTE is responsive to the needs of its client base, developing the strategies and identifying products which will be of maximum value. Growing since its founding to over $2 billion in client assets, EXANTE offers execution services to a range of professional investment management clients, with a focusing on facilitating simple international trading on a single platform. By allowing their clients to trade over 600,000 global instruments from a single platform, EXANTE opens up a world of financial markets in a coherent, easy-to-use central account. The multi-currency account is a key feature, preventing clients from opening and funding multiple trading accounts to access different securities.
Kirienko, together with his fellow founders, quickly identified client privacy and customer service as key areas where an innovative broker needs to outperform the competition. Accordingly, privacy is built into EXANTE accounts from the very beginning, with EXANTE collecting no unnecessary data, and complying with all guidelines on information handling or GDPR. Additionally, and very unusually for the industry, EXANTE runs a round the clock customer service line, including at weekends, with a three minute response time for contact with another human being. This allows clients to deal with technical problems even when markets are closed, preventing them from wasting valuable time during trading hours.
Outside of EXANTE, Kirienko invests in promising start-up companies in a diverse range of industries, including Comino, a manufacturer of liquid-cooled computers. He also regularly speaks at financial conferences and events, sharing his expertise with a wide industry audience. Kirienko is also the father of a thirteen year old son who is already involved in the financial markets, following in his father’s footsteps.
Like each of the founding partners of EXANTE, Kirienko has brought a unique combination of life experience and technical skills to the brokerage. Kirienko describes how he has “always looked at finance from the perspective of conditional probabilities, statistics and game theory”, highlighting his academic and research background, a skill set which has served him well in the complex world of derivatives trading. This expertise continues to shape the client experience of EXANTE customers today, who trade with EXANTE at a greater and greater frequency across an ever-growing range of global instruments.
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