Attributes that make global retail broker Exness a big success

Kenan Van Damme is the Exness Regional Marketing Manager (Sub-Saharan Africa). In this Q&A, he explains what makes the company stand out in a market that is crowding fast.

Q. Exness is fast becoming a household name for those involved in online trading in Africa. Can you tell us how Exness became the largest retail broker in the world and what lies behind your astounding trading volumes?

Exness's success is largely driven by our focus to provide a market-leading product offering, exceptional customer service, and investing in high-quality partners around the world.

Being a market-maker means that we have our own liquidity, and a lot of it, so we are able to offer stable spreads even in volatile times and lightning fast execution speed to ensure customers don't miss out on trading opportunities.

The largest department in the company consists of engineers, mathematicians, and financial analysts, who are constantly working to make sure we offer the most competitive trading conditions, with software that can handle millions of trades executed within milliseconds.

This has attracted some of the biggest traders in the world as they know that we can handle high-volume trades, and that we are reliable when it comes to paying out withdrawals.

Our award-winning 24/7 customer support in 16 languages has ensured long-term loyalty from our traders, and has been a driving force for hundreds of thousands of traders across the globe to switch to Exness as their preferred broker.

Finally, our stringent requirements for partners to join our network means that we only accept the best of the best. This is to ensure that their clients receive the highest level of service from the partners they choose to work with, and it also helps our partners to feel confident that they are promoting a reliable and professional service.

Q. One of the services Exness often talks about is its “seamless deposits and withdrawals”. What exactly makes this process seamless at Exness, and what do you think your edge is over competitors in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Quite simply, we at Exness believe your money is yours. Period.

We have prioritised our development resources to ensure that we offer the best payment experience in the industry, with over 90 percent of our withdrawals being processed automatically. This has helped us develop long-term loyalty with our customers, who know they won't have to wait days for their withdrawals to be processed or hear excuses about why they can’t get access to their funds.

How do we achieve this? We use robust, real-time risk management and anti-fraud solutions, which assure that any given customer’s profit is legitimate and ready for withdrawal immediately upon request. Essentially, all the work is done before the customer requests a withdrawal, eliminating all potential delays at the moment of request. The technology behind our payments infrastructure has been the ultimate game changer when it comes to our market positioning on the matter.

Additionally, our focus for Sub-Saharan Africa is to offer as many payment channels as possible to ensure that customers can reliably fund their accounts and withdraw with ease. Our recent integration with Safaricom in Kenya to offer deposits and withdrawals through MPESA is a testament to this, and we have teams focused on offering more mobile money payment options across the region.

Q. Africa is rife with online brokers who are in fact not to be trusted and often turn out to be scammers. Why should traders trust Exness?

Exness has been in business for 15 years, and within the past five years, we have grown to be the biggest retail broker in the world, recording over $4 trillion in transactions per month globally.

The Exness Group is licensed by eight of the biggest financial regulators in the world, four of these licenses being with trusted regulators in Africa, namely: 

• The Financial Services Commission (FSC) in Mauritius 
• The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) in South Africa
• The Financial Service Authority (FSA) in the Seychelles
• The Capital Markets Authority (CMA) in Kenya.

We are one of the only brokers willing to post our financial reports on our website to show that we are above board and that our claims about being the biggest in the world are not just some marketing gimmick.

We have invested millions of dollars in growing our business across Sub-Saharan Africa, and we don’t plan to stop anytime soon. I believe our customers feel confident that we are here to stay. This has aided in our exceptional growth so far.

Q. Does Exness have a CSR agenda for Sub-Saharan Africa?

Yes we do. In the past year, we have launched the Exness Scholarship Programme in both Kenya and South Africa, in collaboration with the United States International University, and the University of Cape Town, respectively. The scholarship programme is offered to students in STEM fields, and its mission is to give back to the communities within which Exness operates, and enable brilliant young minds to reach for the stars and make their dreams come true. The programme also runs in Cyprus and key Asian regions, and we aim to keep expanding it globally in the years to come.

We have also made numerous donations to primary and secondary schools across the Seychelles over the past two years, where we have donated hundreds of whiteboards to replace the old and worn ones being used.

In South Africa, we teamed up with Gift of the Givers during the pandemic and made a $50,000 donation, which allowed for additional bed space in both public and private hospitals, ongoing supply of oxygen concentrators, and distribution of High Flow Nasal Oxygen machines and oxygen delivery devices to public hospitals.

And we’re not finished yet. Our CSR agenda continues to expand, both globally and in the SSA region. You can always expect to see a new initiative from us every year, whether it relates to education, environmental causes or disaster relief.

Q. What is your view on the future of CFD trading in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Personally, I foresee CFD trading becoming the most popular way for Africans to access the global financial markets. Multi-asset CFD brokers, like ourselves, offer the capability to trade across multiple instruments, including stocks, currencies, metals, energies, and indices, all in one place, and 24/7. Traditional investment platforms don’t allow for this flexibility and limit customers to trade in specific ways that may not suit their trading goals and preferences. 

The introduction of CFD trading apps, like the Exness Android and iOS apps, have also helped to make trading more accessible for the predominantly smartphone-based Sub-Sahara African market.

African financial regulators are gradually introducing legislation to help protect traders' funds and ensure brokers contribute to growing local economies. This is something we, at Exness, fully support, and we have been leaders in securing licenses across the region. The continued cooperation between regulators and licensees will help ensure the sustainability of this industry. We hope that our contributions as thought leaders in this space can be used to develop the industry further.

I am proud to be part of an organisation that is contributing to helping more Africans access the financial markets. I believe that with the entrepreneurial spirit and skills we have seen from customers in our region, Sub-Saharan Africa will soon be global leaders in this space.

VisitExness for more information.