Our strategy

The Group’s focus on the three initiatives of established markets, client journey optimisation and institutional offering remains unchanged for the year ahead. The significant achievements made with the initiatives during 2021 place us in an excellent position to continue to deliver throughout 2022, thereby deriving future value for, and supporting the diversification of, the Group.

Success of the strategy is measured across three initiatives:

Opportunity

The established markets of the UK, Australia and Germany generate a significant part of the Group’s revenue and, given the size and development of the markets, they also offer the greatest absolute growth opportunities. This means that we continue to focus on developing brand and product awareness with the aim of becoming the choice provider to new clients in these regions and offer the premium proposition and financial strength required to attract clients from competitors.

Priorities for 2021/22

  • UK: growth in net trading revenue generated from active professional clients and high value retail clients.
  • Australia: implement ASIC regulatory changes and continue to grow the high value client base.
  • The Group is also focused on the development of a non-leveraged platform which will offer trading and investment products in the UK.
  • Continue to maintain market leading client service levels in all three countries.

Underpinned by technology

  • Proprietary technology easily adapted to meet regulatory requirements.
  • Continue to develop new products in response to client demand.
  • High platform availability maintained and continual reductions to latency implemented.

Progress against 2020/21 objectives

  • Significant growth delivered across all regions within the year in both professional and retail clients, with particularly strong growth in the APAC region.
  • The Group continued to win numerous awards for client service and products throughout the year.
  • Dynamic Trading CFD product launched in May 2021, a key differentiating product for the Group and one of many product innovations that the Group is investing in over the coming years.
  • Native iOS mobile app for stockbroking launched in March 2021, providing our clients with an industry leading mobile offering.

Opportunity

We have led the way in providing a best-in-class client trading experience and generating high levels of customer satisfaction with our product and service. We believe there is a sizeable opportunity to build on this strength and drive greater longevity, stickiness and advocacy from our client base. We are focused on solving our clients’ problems and supporting them on their trading journey and believe this will enable the Group to further improve its capability to attract, build and retain a high quality client base.

Priorities for 2021/22

  • Continue to invest in a responsive, insight-driven platform that is optimised for incremental client learning and growth.
  • Deliver innovative new services that better support our clients to manage their risk and take advantage of suitable market opportunities, which in turn will drive improved customer retention and lifetime value.
  • Simplify and improve the holistic trading experience for our clients, which will improve customer advocacy and share of voice.

Underpinned by technology

  • Formed cross functional squads that are mission orientated around the value proposition we deliver to our clients.
  • Building core capability that will enable us to deliver a peerless trading experience to our target market.
  • Establishing new ways of working across our business to increase the velocity of product delivery, organisational learning and incremental value we deliver to our clients.

Progress against 2020/21 objectives

  • Delivered numerous user experience improvements to our customer onboarding processes, which have improved conversion rates.
  • Delivered premium content, tailored communication processes and notifications covering trading opportunities that help our customers stay abreast of opportunities in the market.
  • The high level of service we provide combined with the user experience optimisations resulted in a Trustpilot score of 4.2/5 at the end of March.

Opportunity

The launch of CMC Markets Connect, our dedicated institutional brand, during 2021 positions us to service an ever-growing number of client types including banks, brokerages and hedge funds globally. Through our API offering (electronic connectivity to the CMC Markets platform for institutions), white label (branded) and grey label (unbranded) propositions clients have access to our award-winning trading technology, low latency price construction and execution and CMC liquidity solutions.

Priorities for 2021/22

  • Building a multi-asset class offering: extracting greater share of wallet from existing client base, as well as appealing to new client types including banks and hedge funds.
  • Grow global awareness of institutional brand: continue to build understanding of our B2B proposition throughout APAC & Europe, utilising upgraded price construction technology and Spot FX product launch (global standard in FX).
  • White Label: continued expansion of our global B2B FX and CFD sales campaign, along with further deployment of our white labelled equity stockbroking business in Australia.

Underpinned by technology

  • Our price construction technology allows us to win business in a highly competitive field.
  • Wider integration with distribution technology hubs to further expand our product reach.
  • Utilising best-in-class technology partners will enable us to expand on our product range through 2022 and beyond.

Progress against 2020/21 objectives

  • Completed project to significantly improve speed of price construction, we continue ongoing work in this area to remain competitive.
  • Integrated with industry standard data centres (Equinix LD4), improving speed, connectivity, convenience and ability to attract new clients.
  • Launched new Spot FX product in June 2021.