X-Trade Brokers invests in Google Apps

Posted by Jakub Zablocki, chairman of X-Trade Brokers

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Jakub Zablocki, chairman of X-Trade Brokers, a brokerage firm founded in Poland in 2002 with locations in more than ten countries in Europe. X-Trade Brokers (XTB) is a European brokerage house specializing in financial instruments traded over both the over-the-counter market and major stock exchange. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At X-Trade Brokers (XTB), our goal is to give our customers the information they need to make sound financial decisions. Like many industries, technology is playing a bigger role in our industry. We pride ourselves on being technologically advanced for our customers. It’s what they demand, whether its a robust online trading platform, a vibrant mobile ecosystem or the latest, up-to-the second update on a stock price. Now, we’ve decided to run our business on Google Apps.

We chose Google Apps because we noticed a gap: we were providing our customers with the latest, most cutting edge technologies to manage their money we weren't doing the same for hundreds of our employees. Our previous solution, Microsoft Outlook, was an on-premise solution. It became too difficult to run a modern, fast-paced brokerage firm on yesterday’s technology - we weren’t providing the tools that our employees needed to keep up. With Google Apps, our employees will have access to information anytime, anywhere from any connected device, allowing them to work how and from where they please. Tools like Google Sites and Google Drive will give our employees the most modern tools available so they can serve our clients in the most efficient way possible.

Google Apps offers a suite of tools we didn’t have access to before. Being in a highly regulated industry means we have to take extra precautions to ensure we save and store sensitive employee information such as email and chat records. On other platforms, this is cumbersome and requires a lot of work on both the IT side and employee side. With Google Apps Vault, that happens in the background, giving us both an enterprise-class way to store our most important information as well as a solution that doesn't get in the way. Our IT department is really looking forward to not having to store and manage this data. Many of our employees have grown up with the web and were already familiar with tools such as Gmail and Google Calendar which will make the transition seamless.

In the financial services industry, speed is everything -- trading on information that’s even five minutes old can result in a risky investment. Our customers demand real-time information so they can make some of the most important decisions in their lives. With our previous technology solution, I always felt as if we were making a bet on old information but now, with the help of Google, our stock is at an all-time high.