Our technology
Our powerful and scalable trading platforms continue to provide us with a competitive advantage. We’ve invested over $100m into our proprietary platform, which is available across desktop, tablet and mobile apps, offering clients flexibility in how the access the financial markets. We use advanced client behaviour analytics, customer feedback and new industry trends to determine our platform development pipeline. This past year brought numerous new innovations to both our web and mobile platforms across CFD, Spread bet and stockbroking.
Product and desktop platform
We completed the HTML platform rollout to all regions, bringing performance enhancements along with a host of innovative new features. Notable upgrades to the desktop platform include:
- three new watchlist views;
- enhanced charting;
- multi-interval chart feature;
- full screen tabs; and
- ability to resize column widths for better layout management.
Mobile apps
We have made several updates to the layout and functionality of
the apps to simplify navigation. Major releases this year include:
- updated Product Library to help users to discover products by adding a range of “new” topical watchlists including: popular products, price movers and those currently trending;
- updated charting package with a range of new features including additional intervals, new draw tools and font size controls; and
- new mini “trend” charts that provide a quick snapshot of recent
price action.
Stockbroking
After successfully transitioning both ANZ and St George broking clients including 103 intermediaries and over 500,000 clients to our stockbroking platform, CMC Markets is now the second largest retail stockbroker in Australia and the largest white label provider in the country. For the ninth consecutive year we have been awarded the Canstar Online Share Trading Broker of the Year.
The stockbroking platform has evolved significantly in the last year and is now one of the most feature-rich solutions available to retail and wholesale clients in the Australian market.
Platform reliability
During a period of unprecedented change in the industry and wider technology landscape CMC Markets has continued to
prioritise operational resilience and cyber security as core to the success of the business. Speed of change in the digital world is everything but for a global online financial business availability, stability and reliability will always be paramount. Despite the high degree of complex change, uptime for the Next Generation platform was in excess of 99.9%.
Speed of execution
Despite the ever growing number of products and prices, speed of execution is still a differentiator for CMC. The automated execution on the Next Generation platform means the execution time of every single trade is minimised. The focus on performance improvements and optimisations means that we have been able to reduce the median execution time from 8.5 milliseconds during the prior financial year to under 7.5 milliseconds for the year ended 31 March 2019. This continues to improve with March 2019 showing a median execution time of just 4 milliseconds.
During the year planning began for a further investment in new infrastructure to support the Next Generation platform with improved performance a key driver for any new technology. A new infrastructure partner has been selected and the implementation of the new solution will begin early in the new financial year.