StoneX Prime Brokerage

Originally started as an agency execution trader and we were selling research to institutional managers .

And over time as you went from a few 100 hedge funds to thousands in the country , a lot of hedge funds didn't have a great home for their prime brokerage accounts .

So we saw an opportunity in the market and a void sort of develop in the market .

And we started a company to fill that void .

There aren't a lot of other middle market prime brokerage providers that are able to provide the global reach that we have with the type of service that we have .

The benefit of our model is like an aggregator .

We get to utilize , we bring together all the clients uh order flow and provides us with it uh cost of access for our clients .

So they benefit from those institutional tools at a lower cost to them .

Due to our aggregation , we bring it together all the multiple clients that we have .

One of the things we saw is is being traders by background .

We were always sort of instant gratification kind of people and a lot of our clients were not being very well served in other prime brokers they were in .

So if we could provide a different level of support and a significantly better client experience , I thought that could really differentiate us .

I've been a NASDAQ market maker .

That's how I started my career .

Over 20 years ago , I was a sales trader at Jefferies and company started um way back in the early two thousands was an execution trader myself being a trader before .

Uh I'm able to put myself in the position of portfolio managers and other traders and see what their problems are on a daily basis .

I understand their urgencies .

I understand that they need things done immediately .

And so uh we're in that business of trying to solve their problems as much as we can film outsourced business serves institutional investors .

And that encompasses long only managers , hedge funds , family offices , as well as end investors such as pensions and endowments .

There's nothing that's ever stagnant .

Things are moving and it's quick and you have to make decisions and um you know , you have to make good decisions , you have to be right .

So I think that's what our clients appreciate .

Um We , we stay on top of everything for them , make it easier for them .

And that's , that's been our biggest selling point throughout the years .

We know how hard it is to manage money for a living .

And so we work hard to let our clients focus on that .

You know , they want to know that somebody's paying attention .

Somebody's got it and somebody's gonna come back to them .

They don't have to remember this again later in the day or the next day and try to follow up with us again .

So , you know , we take a lot of pride in our response time and the fact that people can rely on us to be part of their back office team .

One of the greatest compliments we get from clients years later is I didn't have to staff up as quickly because we had you guys when you call us .

Typically , the person answers the phone is not going to have to look up your account number on a screen .

They're gonna know who you are and they're gonna know something about you and they're gonna know what your typical issues are and they're also gonna know how to help you .

Uh When you have a new issue , it's gonna be very first person .

Uh You're not going to a differentiated team to help you with the back office issue , with a trading issue , with even a capital introduction issue .

It's gonna be very much a first person type of relationship .

Certain groups will only view certain financial information on a firm or personal information on a firm if they must .

So for instance , the credit team is the only one that will be looking at financials , not a sales trader on a different desk .

And that's really important to clients when they're on boarding and sharing , you know , information we give them at launch a well formatted custody clearing and trading architecture that enables them to grow their business .

It's very scalable .

They have multiple choices of custody , multiple choices of trading venues and multiple choices of how high or low touch they would like the trading interactivity to be everything from a fully outsourced model to a very low touch model with highly optimized and best breed algorithmic trading on their desktop .

In the beginning , you really need to work to build that trust and really feel like you're building a partnership with your client as opposed to just winning business .

And it provides them with a continuity from their perspective .

In other words , they can continue to use the same trading system that they've been using for years and they just kind of plug into our system and they can get up and running within a short period of time .

It's a very competitive landscape out there for fund managers to raise capital .

One of the most important things from an investor's perspective is that the fund that they invest in has all of the infrastructure that larger , more institutional funds may have clients need reporting , risk reporting and of course back office services .

So as seamless as we can make that for our clients , the better client experience they're going to have and the better success they're going to have in running their business .

I think the big thing about our reporting and risk system is that it's a very comprehensive system , but it doesn't take a lot of expertise to use the system .

So it does have a lot of capabilities .

But again , we're able to teach people very quickly how to use that system and they're able to use it on a daily basis for their operations .

We have technology systems around , on boarding , around deploying systems around trade breaks , around post trade analysis that just simply weren't possible to put together like this 10 , 15 years ago .

One of the other advantages I think we have is we found early on that a regional presence was really important .

So we're based here in Atlanta , Georgia .

That's where our main headquarters are for the prime brokerage team .

We also have a good presence at Park City Utah as well as the team that's in London , San Francisco , New York and Connecticut , as well as Dallas .

So we found over the years that feet on the ground in local markets is really important in building relationships , understanding our clients needs and being able to help our clients network in their , in their area as well .

Different prime brokers and different clearing firms , all have advantages and disadvantages and pros and cons to each other by being able to mix and match those and have assets at several different custodians and essentially be multi primed , but yet have one service team , one trading system , one reporting system and one cost saves our clients a lot of time and aggravation .

We provide the infrastructure to the client to grow their assets and ultimately receive investments from larger institutions .

It's all in house .

It's one firm that they get to work with and they do not have to kind of shop around and kind of piecemeal what they need to do .

They get to come here and we get to put it all together for them underneath one firm .

They can call us or email us or send us orders in literally any asset at any time of the day , 24 hours a day , six days a week .

And we can execute that and provide best execution .

The reality is we have such pride in our , in our , what we do , our job pride in each other , pride in our clients .

And it really shows very quickly when clients interact with us .

You know , a client will send us an email or make a phone call to us in the morning , hang up the phone 22 minutes later and know that we got it .

We're gonna do it , we're gonna follow up on it .

And these days , I just don't think there's a lot of places you get that satisfaction knowing that you have somebody on your team that's really gonna follow up like that .

And we know when a client calls , we can solve their problem .

And that's a really satisfying thing when a client comes to you with an issue and then you provide a solution to them .

That's one of the greatest things about the job is that satisfaction of knowing you did , you did that for them .