An article based on a panel discussion with Julian Elliott, Integral and Andrew Saks, Brokerage Industry Editor
For years, the brokerage industry invested where the returns were most visible: the front end. Trading platforms became the competitive battleground. Multi-asset interfaces, intuitive dashboards, mobile-first design, and these were where the capital went, and where the marketing followed.
The back end was the afterthought. And the industry is now paying for that decision.
In a recent panel discussion, Remonda Kirketerp-Møller, CEO of Muinmos, joined Julian Elliott, Director of Product at Integral, and moderator Andrew Saks to examine what this means for brokerages today and what needs to change. The conversation ranged from technology stack strategy to the future of real-time regulatory oversight. What emerged was a clear and consistent message: the brokerages that will thrive are those that treat infrastructure as a strategic asset, not an operational cost.
The Legacy of Front-End Investment
Remonda was direct about how the industry arrived here. Large institutional players such as Saxo Bank, Interactive Brokers, and CMC Markets invested heavily from the outset in deep, proprietary trading infrastructure. That investment gave them a lasting competitive advantage. But for the wave of retail brokerages that followed, the path was very different.
“Enormous amounts of money went into the front end. Multi-asset trading platforms became a core requirement, and that is where massive IT resources were invested. It unfortunately neglected a great deal of back-office operations — and that neglect is one of the reasons we see so many issues today with regulatory reporting and the volume of manual work that continues.” – Remonda Kirketerp-Møller
Those retail brokerages often came from outside the industry – from affiliate marketing, from adjacent sectors — without the capital or the fintech foundation to build from scratch. They took the off-the-shelf, white-label route. Everything is hosted on a vendor’s server. No control of the technology, no ownership of the client data in any meaningful sense, and limited ability to adapt as the environment changed.
Now, as regulatory demands intensify and new asset classes emerge, the fragmentation created by that approach is becoming a serious liability. Multiple disparate back-end systems, siloed operations, and manual data consolidation for regulatory submission, where the inefficiency is operational and reputational.
Stop Building What You Are Not Built to Build
One of Remonda’s strongest points in the discussion concerned the persistent tendency of institutions to invest in bespoke infrastructure that is neither their core competency nor a scalable asset.
“There is no question that institutions should stop building this type of infrastructure themselves. Expert technology companies exist precisely to do this and they do it at scale. Many institutions do not realise that the system they have built cannot simply be extracted and deployed elsewhere. It is not portable.” – Remonda Kirketerp-Møller
The consequences of this are more significant than most realise at the time of investment. When an institution built on a bespoke proprietary system comes to consider a sale or public listing, auditors will ask where the client base sits and where the IP resides. If the answer is on a third-party vendor’s server, or if the system is inseparable from the institution’s own liquidity and legacy architecture, the valuation impact is material.
The alternative is a well-structured platform from a specialist software provider, deployed on the broker’s own server, which gives the broker genuine IP ownership, full flexibility, and the ability to plug any front end in for any asset class, without the ongoing development cost or the time-to-market constraint of building from scratch.
Development time from scratch is often longer than the time it takes for a new trend to emerge and for regulators to respond to it. The investment case for bespoke infrastructure is weaker than it appears.
The Expertise Gap
Remonda identified a second structural problem: a shortage of people who understand both the domain and the technology.
Domain expertise alone was sufficient in the earlier years of the industry. It is no longer the case. The market has moved. AI agents, open APIs, MCP servers — these are not peripheral concerns for a specialist technology team. They are now central to how brokerages will interact with clients, manage data, and engage with regulators. Julian Elliott noted that at a recent industry event in Dubai, very few brokerages knew what an MCP server was — yet technology providers are already building this capability into their back ends.
“Hiring domain experts who cannot engage with the technology will still leave significant gaps. Institutions need to hire people who understand and can leverage technological capabilities — not just people who understand the domain.” – Remonda Kirketerp-Møller
The implication for brokerage leadership is clear: the conversation about technology strategy cannot remain confined to a CTO or a development team. Business leaders need to understand what is being built, what is being bought, and whether it will serve the business in eighteen months as well as it does today.
New Asset Classes and the First-Mover Dilemma
The panel addressed the challenge of new asset classes — crypto perpetuals being a current example — and the tension between first-mover risk and the danger of being left behind.
Julian Elliott noted that broker hesitation around crypto perpetuals is largely a function of uncertainty: insufficient revenue visibility, unclear regulatory treatment, and the difficulty of offering a new product on a technology stack that was not designed to accommodate it quickly.
But the conversation highlighted the flip side. If regulators were to restrict or significantly change the treatment of CFDs, what are the alternatives? Crypto perpetuals are a credible candidate. Critical mass is not yet there, but it could be within twelve to eighteen months. Brokers who have not had the technology conversation by then will be at a significant disadvantage.
The broader principle, as Andrew Saks observed, is the Tesla effect: disruption does not come from within an industry. It comes from outside, faster than incumbents expect, and it raises the user experience bar for everyone. The crypto exchange user experience — intuitive, API-first, fast — is already reshaping what a new generation of traders expects. A brokerage with a fixed, legacy-dependent platform will struggle to meet that expectation at the pace the market demands.
What Real-Time Regulatory Oversight Will Look Like
Perhaps the most forward-looking part of the discussion concerned where regulatory oversight is heading.
Remonda sees a future — and not a distant one — where regulators do not merely audit retrospectively, but monitor in real time. Not just trading behaviour, but code. The question shifts from ‘what did your platform do?’ to ‘how is your platform built, and does it conform to the standards we expect?’
“If I am a regulator auditing institution A, I will expect certain behaviour and certain standards. I will expect the same in institution B. That creates a very strong incentive for institutions to use compliant, standardised platforms from expert technology providers.” – Remonda Kirketerp-Møller
This has direct implications for the build-vs-buy debate. A bespoke system built by a brokerage’s own development team, to its own standards, may not conform to the emerging regulatory expectation of standardised, auditable behaviour. A platform built by a specialist RegTech provider, working directly with regulators to make regulation readable for code, is in a very different position.
Muinmos works closely with regulators on exactly this: translating regulatory requirements into code-ready logic, so that compliance can be built into the technology stack rather than layered on top after the fact.
The Connectivity Imperative
A consistent thread throughout the discussion was connectivity, and the absence of which creates fragmentation across every dimension of brokerage operations.
Regulatory reporting, onboarding, KYC, AML, investor protection — all of these require data to flow coherently across systems. AI agents, increasingly the language in which the market is discussing the next generation of automation, cannot function effectively without a coherent communication network underlying them. As Remonda noted, without that connectivity, fragmentation continues regardless of how sophisticated the individual tools are.
The efficiency gains from getting this right are substantial. What might take a compliance team member a full day of data extraction, analysis and reporting can now be delivered in seconds by a well-integrated system. Those gains are not incremental improvements; they are competitive differentiators.
The brokerages that will succeed are not necessarily those with the most sophisticated front end. They are those with the most coherent, connected, compliant back end — one that can adapt as the market and the regulatory environment continue to evolve.
The Conversation That Needs to Happen Now
The panel’s conclusion was practical: the technology conversation cannot wait. For brokerages evaluating their stack, whether built in-house or through third-party vendors, the questions are the same:
- Does our current technology stack serve what we need today — and will it serve what we need in twelve to eighteen months?
- Are we building infrastructure that is genuinely portable, scalable and capable of being valued as an asset?
- Do we have people in the business who understand both the domain and the technology — not just one or the other?
- Are our back-end systems connected well enough to support AI integration, multi-asset reporting and real-time regulatory compliance?
- Are we talking to our technology vendors about what is on their roadmap — not just what they offer today?
These are strategic questions, not technical ones. They belong in the boardroom and the CEO’s office, not only in the CTO’s.
Watch the full discussion above. If you would like to explore how Muinmos can support your institution’s compliance and regulatory technology infrastructure, get in touch.