Other foreign entities got into the same category of non-accepted subjects and they won’t be allowed to advertise for Russian clients as well. This amendment took effect from October 1, 2015

Also foreign corporate entities in Russia are not allowed to promote their Forex services to Russian clients as of October 1, 2015.

In Cyprus, the CySEC watchdog strengthened its grip, with the latest sanctions and issued a directive ordering investment companies to obtain regulatory APPROVAL FOR A CORPORATE OR BRANDING NAME CHANGE.

CySEC is mostly focused on forex and binary options brokers in this case. It mentioned misleading information in the name of the companies like an ‘asset management’, which could evoke a wrong interpretation by the client.

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1.Nir Eyal – Hooked

Nir’s book is a sophisticated guide to set a habit-forming technology, which should not be neglected by product managers, marketers or even designers.

Nir pays attention to the system of decisions related to purchases. In simple words – why some products are popular and people buy them, and not the other ones, based on the habits of customers, not their active choice.

2.“Growth Hacker”

Firstly introduced by Sean Ellis in his blog post in 2010, later widened by Andrew Chen in a post titled “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing”.

Growth hacking is a technique, used in marketing, to use creativity, analytical thinking and social metrics for selling. It is contrarian to classic models of marketing, proposing low cost techniques, small budgets, mostly popular for startups. It became famous in relation to Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb or Dropbox.

3.James Collins – Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

The major goal of Collins is to provide the reader with information of an effective transition of companies from average to great or about the reasons of their failure. As a “great” company he sees any company that can endure better as a market average for a longer time. 

This book can be proposed for managers in all the sectors, as it provides information, how a proper leader should lead the company to its success.

4.Chan Kim, R. Mauborgne – Blue Ocean Strategy

Both authors brought us an insight into success from another perspective. They found out that successful companies did not battle competitors but were able to create “blue oceans” of uncontested marketplace. They propose this strategy rather to open a new demand and get rid of competition struggle.

This book presents framework and tools for the readers how to create a blue ocean.

5.Mark Douglas – Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

Douglas presents here couple of myths that are able to play role in our success. Most of all, he focuses on traders and their errors they make – “Ninety-five percent of the trading errors you are likely to make—causing the money to just evaporate before your eyes.“

His book should be read to reconsider our risks and their relation to previous luck.

6.Sam Page – Unconscious Marketing: 25 Cognitive Biases That Compel Your Customers to Buy (Without Them Knowing)

Sam Page is paying attention to the decision-making process. We all are likely to believe that logic, facts, and common sense play a role in our decision-making processes. But most of the time we use unconscious mental shortcuts, based on faulty assumptions related to existing data or any prior information.

This is naturally what every marketer should understand and grasp, how the customers are assessing the offers.

7.Robert Cialdini – Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Mr. Cialdini focuses on the customer’s decision-making process as well. He presents the psychology of the customers and reasons, why he says the magical “yes” to you. Rather than only understanding these reasons, there are also hints how to apply these understandings.

The post Books that every financial marketer or manager should read appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Let’s take a look into couple of hints, which could help you:

1.Social trading

New popular trends are a must for you, if you like it or not. People love it and traders aren’t different as well. Social trading is just an alternative for Facebook for traders, which can motivate them to trade further and avoid their quick failures.

If you are a successful trader, you can keep your nickname without people knowing you name and you can still show your awesome results to them.

On the other hand new ones can learn from you, follow you and admire you performance.

All this is needed to create community of traders under one roof. If you are able to do so, they will hesitate to leave you and first step towards stronger retention is made.

2.Copy trading

As mentioned above, new traders love to check successful traders, so via social trading they are able to copy their trade positions and feel sure about their accounts. In this case they don’t leave their trades that quickly when they are not sure about them or they do not hesitate with new positions when they know that someone else did it as well.

This is a new phenomenon, helping new attendees to learn from the old ones and thus enabling brokers to improve their tools of retention.

3.Education

Further education of traders is often a good way to boost confidence towards a broker as they can feel that you really care about them and you want them to enhance their performance.

Especially the absolutely new traders appreciate this possibility and we can see lots of brokers today to post their educative videos on their website.

Thus the trader, who is interested in further education, waits for another video rather than trying a different broker for learning more.

4.Marketing automation tools

We all know that a direct contact between the client and his broker needs to be permanent. Maybe some clients see it as disturbing, but statistics is showing that if you don’t contact your clients regularly, they leave with higher frequency.

Instead of having loads of people checking the last communication with all the respective clients, marketing automation and retention tools are used among the larger brokers with wider clients’ portfolio.

Such system will contact your clients automatically and you will know which clients when to contact if needed. It provides a quick survey, which is useful for you to know more about every exact client as well (so you know when to contact them by person if they lost too much recently, etc.).

5.Be unique and nice to your clients

At last but not at least, we have to mention this point, relevant in every business. This is a very general hint but you need to know your strong and weak factors and upgrading your service to clients in any way (even a small advantage or price for them) that will be unique.

Moreover, just a simple human hint – be nice to them. Especially those new traders without any self-confidence like friendly behavior together with all the above-mentioned points.

If you just try to behave like this, we believe that you can improve your retention significantly and boost confidence of your traders.

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More and more broker houses see the potential of sport sponsorships and getting related to any popular sports and respective clubs. We expect the year 2016 to bring even more sponsors from the financial industry (mostly into the soccer) to support their brand a reach as many people as they can. Most popular sports are the best way now to get wider awareness about you.

2.Budgets spent on AdWords to be narrower

One of the most common ways – PPC marketing and media buying of various pricing models are showing signs of saturation and are expected to decrease.

We see the companies to spend lower budgets via these tools as there are more lucrative and modern ways to reach their targeted customers.

3.Brokers to turn from marketing agencies to in-house solution

Many brokers do not really understand the digital marketing in full scale or they neglect it without any appropriate strategy. In this way they prefer to use external marketing agencies, which have the infrastructure or at least know more about the strategy.

We expect the brokers to turn to in-house solution in couple of years. If not in 2016, next years will show luring most of the marketing agencies to respective brokers completely or their top managers to build-up a corporate strategy for the digital marketing.

4.Mobile trading on the rise

This case is related to Asia mostly, but could apply to the western world during next years as well. We saw an increase in traders using mobile devices and they are still expected to rise. Apps are improving much faster now compared to the desktop possibilities so traders on the phone could see wider controllability of their accounts through their smartphones.

5.Brokers will focus more on data

Most brokers’ weakness lies in their data neglect. They don’t use sophisticated methods for predictions (only some exceptions), leaving this part of their business to be done through simple methods.

Next years should bring even higher competition, forcing brokers to make their statistics more appropriate and direct. We expect them to be focused more on data through the metatrader and think more about their potential traders, what they do, what they expect and where they can be found or how they can be kept in their portfolio.

6.Social trading

Social trading remains the winner of previous year. New traders are always in need of the best hints for them as they are often confused how to start or they tend to lose their initial deposit extremely quickly.

This way enables them to copy positions of skilled and successful traders or at least experienced ones, who can provide them with a complete survey of their positions.

Social trading has only started and it is estimated that it will rise as a social network in this sector even further and the year 2016 will be no exception.

7.Automation to become more widespread

Marketing automation became popular and brokers have already caught this trend. It is much easier and faster for them to set their simple campaigns through automated systems with all the set conditions they need.

This trend is also expected to increase over next few years until reaching a point of saturation. Marketing agencies will have to adapt to these new conditions as well.

The post Financial Marketing Predictions 2016 appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

According to the statistics of Accenture, fintech investment increased 201% in comparison with the year 2014, while the entire venture capital saw a growth of only 63%.

1.Innovation

First of all, innovation plays a key role in most of the sectors and banking sector is not an exception. Most of the larger banking institutions use permanently their conservative ways and among the top innovations we could see only couple of well-known US or European banks.

They tend to neglect areas of lower profit as money transfer business or small loans. This segment is the most likely to be taken over by fintech startups.

We can see banks using wide budgets to get the most talented and skilled human resources, setting the best infrastructure and proposing new products. Nevertheless, they remain focused on core products of deposits and lending, while customers don’t have the tendency to change their banks often. According to the Consumer Intelligence survey, only 3% of customers change their banks per year.

As the financial sector is constantly wider and wider, banks are not able to cover all the niches constantly, providing a space for new institutions as they have to keep their customers’ base.

2.Fintech banks

Most of the fintech startups are struggling at the beginning as they have to focus on their niche. This is natural, as acquiring a client takes high costs in current environment.

But once they overcome this first stage, they can take the advantage of providing other financial products to their actual customers and widen their services in related sectors. For example small loans can widen their services to insurance, mortgages, etc. Or money transfers can turn to deposits as well.

When reaching enough clients, a horizontal expansion remains the major opportunity to keep existing customers and get new ones.

3.Intermediaries

As mentioned above, banking institutions can’t focus on all the sectors, but they would like to provide the widest scale of services to their clients. Here comes the question, why not to use services of intermediaries.

To develop an expert in any of the weaker sector takes time and costs money, so partnership with intermediaries are useful for most of the institutions to optimize their budgets on their core business. Thus they are able to sustain higher competition, which increases costs significantly.

Moreover, such environment is an opportunity for marketing companies, making a system under one brand and keeping customers satisfied with the entire variety of services under one roof.

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