Marketech acquires the Opentrader client book for scale, on the hunt for more

In another round of consolidation in the online trading space, platform developer Marketech Ltd has agreed to acquire the retail trading clients of Opentrader, from the Openmarkets Group, for their Marketech Focus retail trading product.

Travis Clark, the Managing Director of Marketech is understandably pleased.

“We’re all looking forward to introducing them to their new state-of-the-art home. We’ve got quite a few new features nearing release too, so they’ll get a taste of our ‘always in beta’ product strategy straight up.”

This was a sensible move for both companies, as Marketech and Openmarkets specialize in complementary parts of the same eco-system. Marketech attracts the high-volume traders – with their high-function live-streaming trading platform – and Openmarkets are a wholesale market participant that benefits from higher traded volumes. This acquisition also comes at a pivotal time for Marketech as they continue to work on upgrades to their retail platform, with some other novel products sitting in the wings.

“Traded volume through our Focus retail product should now be well over $100m per month and close to half a billion in client assets on HIN and in Macquarie CMAs. The Focus platform has attracted the serious investors that seem to trade in good markets and bad, or maybe it just better helps them to navigate volatility.”

Best practice online trading

Clark believes that this acquisition assists Marketech in communicating their vision of how online trading should be.

“The share market is not simple, so we want to make it more understandable and narrow the information gap between pros and retail. We’ve built our platform so that everyone could use it – it’s cheap, mobile, and easy to learn. It can even be bolted on to other trading businesses to improve their offering or be modified for other uses. And we’re motivated by our subscription business model to continually improve the platform.

Marketech Focus is our response to the demand for industry best practice in both technology and financial services. We make the stockmarket better.”

Clark wouldn’t disclose the actual metrics of the deal but joked that it could form a billion-dollar company if bullmarket revenue multiples were still being used to value unlisted fintech companies. Marketech had also reported that their traded share volumes doubled in August, prior to the acquisition, in what has been a generally subdued market for most other players.

“Let’s just say that our shareholders, our clients and Openmarkets should all be happy with the way Marketech is going. Even the ASX. Probably not the banks though, unless they’re looking for a way to get out of online trading altogether.