FYERS goes for the cloud
Implements zero-trust policies, VPN, VDI, multi-factor authentication and alerts to ensure security:
FYERS, the technology focused stock broking firm, offers seamless trading platforms to traders and investors across all major Indian exchanges. It has a strong community of traders and investors and is currently powering t housands of customers to trade seamlessly, across all major Indian exchanges.
FYERS had a business continuity plan (BCP) in place even before the onset of the covid lockdown. It implemented additional measures to ensure that its team could work from home without any challenges and disruptions. It also ensured that most of the internal applications which do not contain sensitive information are accessible securely over the web. According to Tejas Khoday, CEO and co-founder, access to critical applications, which contain sensitive information, is well protected and enabled only via VPN and Virtual Desktop Instances (VDIs). The company has also implemented zero-trust policies and access to VPN and VDIs are provided on an as-needed basis. There is centralized authentication for users of internal email, chat, voice and video communications, which have been enabled on the cloud. But, in order to ensure secured access to these applications, it has implemented policies such as multi-factor authentication and alerts in case of logins from a new device.
The company also use Google Chat, Google Meet and Slack for internal communications. It also has a significant edge i n handling market data of exchanges, order execution and other such vital aspects that it believes define the future of the business.
WEB, MOBILE PLATFORM
The company’s growth has primarily happened on the back of word of mouth referrals and micro influencers that tend to talk about the benefits of trading with its platform and highlight its features. It does not go after first-time users who have little or no idea about trading as of now. Says Khoday: “100% of our business happens online as clients prefer trading through our web and mobile platforms rather than calling us to place trades on their behalf. We don’t have a digital strategy as such. We harness the closeknitted trading community online to increase awareness about capital markets via our blog, School of Stocks and forums. Of our 40,000 clients, many are already traders or inquisitive about trading.”
ALGO TRADING
FYERS has recently tied up with leading data vendor, TrueData to offer preferred access to algo trading and reliable data feeds using integrated trading APIs. “This collaboration,” says Khoday, “will create a comprehensive API for our retail clients. It will integrate our trading APIs with TrueData’s market data APIs. Used with any programming language, the integrated API will enable traders to create and execute strategies while accessing real time data feed. The integrated API will be critical for the retail trading community who wish to automate their trades and algorithms.”
To drive functionality, FYERS has also offered an integrated Python library, which could help developers at the beginner level to get started right away. While the trading API is free, the datafeed API is offered at a nominal rate.
“Having access to accurate realtime data is critical in trading since the smallest time disparity between a quote and the real-time situation can reverse a profit into loss. Many of our API users requested us to bring a better deal, in terms of datafeed, to our trading APIs. Therefore, we collaborated with TrueData to offer a real time data to our API users, who can create and execute their strategies and even automate trades if required. We have an entirely new backend, customized and hosted to serve very low latency datafeeds directly from NSE & MCX for indices, equities, futures and options. This is our second offering after the launch of TradingView Widgets that enhances market data tracking,” says Khoday.
PARTNER IN ALGO TRADING
FYERS has recently partnered with TradeTron to make algo t r a di ng accessible to Indian retail traders. Tradetron.tech is a multi asset, multicurrency, multi exchange algo strategy marketplace, which allows people to create algo strategies using its state of the art, web based strategy builder. Tejas Khoday explains: “TradeTron has synergized to help simplify the experience without having to code anything and we’ve brought down the cost of algo trading to a large extent. The cost saving is in addition to our FYERS Trading API being completely free.” The other main partners of FYERS include Money Bee
Institute, traderji.com, chittorgarh.com and Trader’s Destination. Khoday says the partner initiative aims to increase the stock market participation rate in India and also build awareness and education about the market ecosystem.
ANALYTICS FOR CRM
Analytics has helped FYERS refine the trading experience by eliminating features and parts of its platform that are not being used. It has built a comprehensive support portal to help resolve queries faster. Khoday says the company has built its own CRM using open source software and thus it is able to customize it to its needs. It has inbuilt intelligence to help find what one is looking for.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Khoday says the company’s presence on social media is pretty good. So far, it never had a marketing department or budget so it relied on interacting with traders and investors on the web across various social media platforms. It also has not undertaken any major marketing and advertising campaigns yet. “In the current financial year, we are looking forward to launching our brand new mobile app. I’m really excited about it because it is particularly built keeping in mind the needs of active swing and day traders. Since we believe in organic and steady growth, we may continue with the same approach without many changes,” he says.
FYERS uses a hybrid setup comprising physical infrastructure as well as public cloud. Khoday says cloud gives the ability to scale, based on the requirement rather than binding to physical infrastructure which is difficult to scale quickly. “We spend a significant portion of our revenues on IT infrastructure and technology,” says he.