X-Trade Brokers (XTB) – fintech software development

Client

Leading Forex and CFD Brokerage Group, one of the biggest publicly traded FX brokerage companies in the world, with offices in 11 countries. Well-known due to their technological excellence, extremely vast offer (with over 5000 instruments), and ambitious marketing campaigns, magnified by famous celebrities, such as Mads Mikkelsen and Jose Mourinho.

Problem

XTB offered excellent, top-notch solutions for demanding clients – who wanted to trade fast and with best market offers – with sophisticated needs, especially in terms of technology. As their client base grew over the years and the world of technology expanded rapidly with greater Internet access and advent of mobile devices, those needs started being more and more diversified. Although XTB developed some software internally, fulfilling all the needs of the clients and partners required additional capabilities, focused solely on this goal. Hence, XTB decided to share parts of their infrastructure through xAPI – an interface exposed for external integrations – and find partners capable of developing custom software based on xAPI, based on clients’ requirements, while XTB could focus on their core business.

What we did

Our cooperation started with just one project, namely a web application for trading on multiple accounts at the same time. We delivered it on time and started working on the next few projects. After a year, a wide portfolio of over ten applications, delivered for different branches of XTB, were available in xStore – their store with applications that expanded standard XTB infrastructure. At this time, a second type of projects started coming along – requests from XTB’s partners that wanted to establish white-label brokerages using XTB infrastructure, in cooperation with X Open Hub – a company specialized in supplying technological support for institutional partners. Just as with regular clients, they often required some additional capabilities, unavailable within a set of standard tools. This led to another couple of clients (and many more projects since each white-label client usually required not just one tool, but a comprehensive set of additional applications, both front-office and back-office).

We can recommend Makimo as a trustworthy software vendor. 

Jakub Zablocki, XTB

Timeline

We began cooperation with XTB in 2012, delivering first applications before the year ended. In 2013, we started working with white-label partners. The biggest development cooperation lasted until 2015, with some projects being developed until 2017. From the very first moment our applications started functioning in the production environment, we supported them until the whole initiative ended in 2018. Further cooperation with white-label companies was extended far beyond this date.

Technology stack

The initial versions of the first applications, back in 2012, were developed using Java EE platform, with Ajax-powered JSF. Although the applications were working as intended, in real scenarios, especially with volatile instruments, they turned out to be not sufficient – simply because state-of-the-art web technologies were too slow at that time. This is when we decided to switch to a new – at that moment – technology of Web Sockets. It was still unavailable in older browsers; however, it was not a problem, because XTB clients were technologically conscious and suggesting the update of a web browser was not a big issue.

Therefore, we rewrote initial applications, and the further development of new products was done in the new stack, using Node.js with MongoDB in the backend – back then still considered rather niche technologies. Modern JavaScript frontend was connected with the backend using WebSockets (the Socket.IO library in particular, in order to ensure backward compatibility). Performance achieved with the new architecture was drastically improved, being on par with Flash clients, widely used back then in the web browsers for the similar purpose, and even with native applications.

Our unique contribution

Aside from the technological improvements, what proved to be extremely useful was the knowledge of Forex markets and investing processes, due to previous personal experience of investing in various types of instruments, such as shares, commodities, and Forex, by members of our team. Instead of having to engage in lengthy discussions to understand basic concepts of how the markets work, what is the meaning of data exchanged and how the trading process looks like, we could focus on the core business processes implemented in each application.

One of the biggest achievements in the whole cooperation process was creating a set of reusable components, such as a live feed chart, trading panels, or a list of tickers (current instrument prices). After first successful deployments, it resulted in our ability to create applications from scratch for testing in a matter of days! At the same time, we were still able to customize every part of the application, therefore maintaining a great velocity–flexibility ratio in those projects.