 Good morning everyone, we're coming to you from sunny Cyprus and today we're talking to the partnership manager of Tick Milk, Mr. Alexi. So, today we're going to go through some information about becoming an IB and we're going to discuss some topics that may interest you and help you succeed. So, good morning Alexi, how are you? I'm doing very good, thank you and a good morning. Yeah, nice to have you here. Thank you. So, what I wanted to start off with is could you tell us a little bit about the ideal kinds of people that are going to become an IB? Ah, sure. What I can say is that from my experience any person can become an IB. There isn't a specific criteria that would justify a person's ideal or not. It's all about dedication, it's all about their effort and it's all about passion in what you do. And it's only a matter of how much effort you want to put into it to become a successor. Ah, okay, so it's not more about the kind of person, it's about the effort you put in. It's all about effort and it's all about your will to grow yourself in this business and there is a person trying to deliver really good product to their customers and it's all about doing something, taking an extra mile. Right, okay. So, we were talking about individuals, but what about businesses? So, what kind of businesses could be good as an introducing broker? Well, there is a belief that there are certain businesses that you'd better IB business. I would say that the businesses which are connected to the financial industry, the businesses where people interact with others, businesses where you come across others willing to invest, yes, they give you certain potential to grow your business faster. But overall, I can say that any business can be good enough to start an IB. When you were mentioning about finance businesses, what kind of businesses would those be just to give our viewers an idea? I've seen many people who would become successful IB who acted as, let's say financial advisors, they worked in banking business, they had some connections with investors and so on. However, I saw others who were much involved in all kinds of marketing and I believe this gives them even a better start as opposed to people who are just involved in, let's say, financial industry because our IB business is mostly about marketing. So, if you have these skills, if you have this knowledge, in my opinion you are more likely to succeed. Wow, okay. So, it's taking a lot of skills from a lot of different places? Yes, it did. Okay, cool. So, what characteristics does this successful IB require? In my opinion, if you really want to become successful IB, there are just a few really critical points and really critical factors that you have to consider. One of them is that you have to actually deliver a value to a person. We live in the 21st century and a lot of things happen faster and this industry is very competitive. Therefore, it's not enough just to invite a person or try to convince to follow you or join you. What's more important is to deliver something that would have a value in the eyes of the person you are talking to. Another one that I would like to mention is that you have to be delivering a really good product. We live in the times where audience became very mature and now you really want to have something worthy from you. Competition in this industry is really tough. That's why if you are delivering a product which fits and suits the standard and all expectations of the people, they will be very much delighted and they will stick to you, they will be lower out to you. At the same time, apart from having a good product, you have to really deliver good service. Because it's all about talking to people and people expect you to deliver good service which means that you have to be very responsive, you have to be a pro in what you do, your information has to be very useful and you have to speak the same language, etc. So it should be quite easy for them to communicate with you and to use your product. Another thing that I would like to mention is that you really need to speak to a good broker because as an IB you operate as a middleman between the broker and the audience. That's why you are very much exposed to the people you are referring to the company. And it's very critical to work with a good company because if something goes wrong, your clients will really blame you for referring them to the company which is not good. Just so we can clarify, the successful characteristics you are talking about are first of all providing a value-added service. Value-added service, yes. So there's something else that traders can gain from working with you. There's the extra content so they can actually read up about certain topics, improve themselves, education wise. And then also you mentioned about the broker itself. So obviously it has to be a good broker that is getting the right trading conditions. What do you feel an IB could do aside from those factors, or maybe a development of those factors that could increase the quality and quantity of the people that they're referring? So getting more people to agree to that. My personal research would say that you can succeed only in the event you aim to reach as many people as you can. Therefore, there are two really critical factors that play an important role here. The first one is the quality of the leads, the quality of the people you're approaching, and the second one is the quantity. Since we live in the times of social media, internet, the really fast communication, regardless of how many personal connections you have, in the event you try to reach over to people through internet, you can really expand your network much more other than when dealing with the people that you personally know. How many people can an average person know 100, 200, maybe a thousand? When we talk about our Facebook with over 2 billion visitors and 2 billion users, definitely you have much more potential. You have to have a network of approximately 2,000 people. This is the number when you feel yourself as confident that what you're doing is being paid off. Basically, it's your network because out of this active referral there will be people that would be actually doing what you're asking them to do. The others would be just basically following you but also it's a matter of word of mouth. They will be referring you to others and others will be referring you to others, etc. You have to be building kind of like a big fan club. So it's like exponential, so it keeps rolling like a snowball. Absolutely. That's point number one. Point number two is the quality. You may have really lots of people following you but only small fraction of them would become your clients but this fraction would be delivering you the profits. And having a skill to identify these people, having a skill to convert these people from being just followers to being the traders is really what matters a lot and segregate these people from the others, dedicate more time, deliver a better product to them and it will pay off since these people will actually be the ones generating eventual commissions to you, isn't it? You were talking about commissions, so leading on from there, what kind of commissions or structures are available to IBs now? There are many different options available. Let's talk about the ones that are more common on the market. The one which is used by majority of brokers and which is very well known to most of the IBs is a volume-based commission. This is the commission where the IB gets the benefits from the volume traded by their clients. There are maybe certain amounts of money paid for each lot or certain number of people paid for each lot and the concept here is that the higher the volume generated by clients, the more the IB is going to receive. There is another one where an IB gets compensated for the clients that became active with this broker. It's called CPA cost per activation or cost per acquisition. That's an option where an IB gets commissioned for referring a qualified person to the company, a qualified meaning that this person has to fulfill certain requirements. That's mostly used by the people who are capable to generate significant traffic from their website, for instance, or from their web page to the broker and the hope that at least a certain portion of this traffic will actually come in. Can I just ask those kinds of clients? Would that tend to be more people that are following the IB and maybe their trading strategy in the way that they work rather than individuals that are kind of autonomous so they have their own trading strategy? Maybe the different commission schemes are working together. Basically, it can be both. The whole constant between the two is that in the first case scenario, their IB is more likely to actually interact with their clients, support them, provide their feedback, etc. In the second case scenario, it exists mostly for those IBs who don't really talk to their clients at all. They only hope to generate loads of traffic and to have at least some of this traffic converted. That's the major difference between the two. What are the kind of mistakes that a lot of IBs are making? What are the ways that you would say that they could overcome them? That's a fair question because I tend to see there are quite many people who just started this business trying to find their way and build their business in an IB, but they all make the same mistake. The clients became more experienced and the expectations are quite high. Therefore, if you decide to proceed with being an IB, you have to stick to the idea that you should not be doing any direct hard sales. People would like to learn what kind of added value you are going to deliver to them. They will evaluate it. If they're happy with it, they will follow you. So having these hard sales, direct sales, would really scare them away and play the opposite role. At the same time, which comes along with what I've just mentioned, aggressive sales don't really work in this business any longer. You may have certain results, but if you think of this business as a long-term project, it will not work to what you benefit. Do be professional, do be delivering the value, and then the success is going to come. If you're aggressive, people will not really like it much. You briefly touched on it before when you were talking about the characteristics or the things that a successful IB would need, but could we go into a little bit more detail about what an IB should be looking for from their broker? I believe that nowadays the IB should be looking for a well-regulated broker. So it's not a guarantee that this broker will be the best broker in the world, but it's kind of an extra layer of security because nowadays it's very difficult to receive a license from such places as the UK, Australia, Singapore, or Europe in general, and this license has a certain... implies certain requirements toward the broker in the sense of having this broker follow quite strict rules and protect the interests of the investors, etc. It's good to stick to that broker. Another point is the reputation. Even though the reputation is not something material, you need to really collect as much information about your broker as possible, but have some healthy skepticism when reading about this or that company. Both too good or too bad comments about the broker should actually alert you because nothing in this world is perfect. Okay. So what do you think are key factors that are really, really important to building an online presence? You were talking a little bit earlier about when you were talking about the traffic and the way that people are faring through. In my opinion, if you decided to go into this IB business, you have to consider it as a long-term project. It's not the place where you can actually make your money fast. Our research shows that first three months are the most critical, the most difficult, the most stressful because this is the time when you're trying to position yourself on the market and this is the time when people just get to know who you are. That's when you cannot really expect much of returns in form of commission, but that's the time when you're actually building solid base for your future. So do consider it as something that's going to exist for a long time. And last point is marketing. Nowadays, marketing plays a very important role. No matter how good you are, how good your product is, if others don't know about it, they will not actually join you. It will not work to your benefit. So the last thing I want to talk about is the models that IB is using. So we were talking about the products they were offering, the methods that they were capturing, but are there any specific models, so a fully comprehensive solution that IB could or would use? That's a very good question because some people think that in order to succeed in this business, you have to be offering something unique. In my opinion, it's the opposite. There are maybe 10 products which I use most often by IBs in order to build their business. We're talking about such things as signals. A lot of people are trying to find their way how to trade good. And they use the signals as a reference to either support their trading ideas or maybe find an alternative to their own thinking. Teaching and tutoring is also very much demanded because it's an enormous market and a lot of people join for its business every single day. A lot of them do really need a certain amount of training, certain amount of information, and they seek for professional advice. Training nowadays is very often automated. And in this industry, expert advices or all sorts of automated training solutions are very much demanded because, again, not everybody has time to learn or has time to trade, but there are plenty of people willing to have access to their softwares which allow them to profit from the currencies. Not all of them know how to code, not all of them know how about programming. Therefore, they're looking for their service providers capable to deliver them these pieces of software. From my observations, I would say that you should not be looking into something unique. You need to pay more attention to what you deliver, the quality of your product, even though it's something which is already offered by others and how you market it to your audience. Wow. Okay. So I think we've covered quite a lot today. Just a few takeaway points. So, Alexi, you feel that the best way to kind of progressives an IB is by adding value added services to work on the marketing. Correct. But you also mentioned that it doesn't have to be specific to one way and it also doesn't have to be unique as long as you're adding the proper value and you're paying real attention to the level of service that you're providing. Yes, that's correct. People became very much demanding. This industry is very competitive. Therefore, your clients expect you to deliver a certain level of service to them. You have to be supportive. You have to be quick in the sense of responding to them. And you have to be quite professional in knowing what you're doing. So if you're a coder and you know how to build automated trading solutions, you have to be quite confident in how to adjust it to changing the situation on the market. If you're a tutor, you need to be knowing certain things and be able to deliver the knowledge to the people. Yes. Thank you everyone. So this is all we've got time for today but we'll be back soon with a lot more about Tickwell. Thank you very much for joining us and have a great day.