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How we built B2B

Hello, Habr! I manage products and sometimes projects at Exness. It so happened that most of my experience is related to products and services that one company sells or provides to another company - B2B.

If you have a successful B2C business (for example, a payment system or telemedicine), then now you are looking for new growth points, as the usual business has changed. Often the question arises about providing your product / platform / solution according to the B2B model.



I will share our experience that we gained when building a product line focused on the B2B market in Exness. This will help to adjust your expectations, and generally answer the question: "Is it worth it to start?"

Exness is an international fintech company, a broker that has existed since 2008 and has become a leader in the industry. The main focus of the company is the Asian market. 

We operate in a decentralized brokerage market with very high competition for the client and, as a result, overstated customer expectations. Decentralization means that the conditions of different brokers may differ and there are no uniform rules for doing business, but in fact price competition and customer experience rule the score.

Unlike the centralized exchange market, which is heavily monopolized by large players, you cannot just stop trading on WTI oil because your systems are not ready for negative prices , and then close all contracts at a price of -37 and issue invoices to pay off debt to customers. We have only one way: if customers have lost money due to our problems - to compensate for all losses, otherwise the customer base will become much thinner.

At the stage of formation, the brokerage market has earned a rather dubious reputation due to the low entry threshold, but unlimited competition has put everything in place. 

You should now have: 

  • The minimum price and the best trading conditions to be attractive to the client;
  • A large variation of trading interfaces (mobile, web, desktop, API). A beginner will not deal with prof. terminal, and the pros will not come to you if there are no functions familiar to him;
  • 24/7 multilingual service in order to have time to solve the problem of the client now and in his language;
  • And the main thing is risk management, so that at the lowest price and the best trading conditions, you do not fly out of business overnight.

For us, the decision to create B2B products is related to business scaling issues:

  • Adding local payment systems does not always pay off;
  • Localization issues, not only texts, but also creatives and UI;
  • Compliance with regulatory requirements in different regions;
  • Support for various product offers for segments of local customers;
  • Trite - the presence of partners in the region, if you go through an affiliate channel or understanding the specifics of the region, if you go through organics.

When you do everything yourself, the business will grow, but the scale will be different. If you do not add a local payment system in conditional “Pakistan”, then you lose 10-15% of customers in the region. The requirements of customers in different regions begin to contradict each other, and you are forced to lead an excess product line, which reduces conversion. As a result, the business grew 2 times, and could 10. 

In theory, everything is simple


The approach was as follows: we take the current retail solution, make a copy, preferably automatically from the code (so that it can be shipped in hundreds), change the identity (logo, colors, website) and ship to the partner. The local partner takes over the attraction, because he knows better that he works in his region and culture, solves issues with payment decisions (he can at least accept and issue payments in cash), he understands local regulation (he can read without an interpreter in Hindi or Afrikaans) . You are left with the basic technology and focus on the product. Profit is shared.

It was a beautiful hypothesis.

First customer


The direction began with the first client, whom he attracted to the company CEO. For this client, we, a group of eight people working in their free time from their main duties, raised the trading infrastructure in AWS, developed an API for connecting his personal account to trading servers, and a month later he went into production. Support was provided by all team members in a chat with a client, and the remaining "little things" were planned to be finalized in another two to three weeks. 

At this speed, we did not think about insignificant parts like a business model, pricing, OSes, or even a contract. Why, all this can be done later)))

The next step is the development of a boxed solution. To do it in our free time was a bit problematic, and we formed a team for constant work.

Looking ahead, I want to say that we have been finalizing the remaining "little things" for this client for about another year, while he left us twice and returned. The concept of “expand all” was destined to die under the load of Legacy, left over from the rapid growth of the company. Easy to abstract a piece of product for a particular client did not work.

Boxed Solution


After we received a confirmation of interest in our solution (there was one client), we began to look for new customers and prepare a solution containing full functionality.

We are faced with a huge variability in customer requests. Companies from the industry already had their own website, personal account, trading servers, reporting system, and they only needed liquidity with delivery via the FIX API (which we did not have). For beginning brokers, trading servers and reporting were relevant. Companies from related industries wanted a frame to integrate into their application or monstrous integration with their proprietary system. A turnkey turnkey solution was interesting only for some of the current partners, but they had other needs (getting regulation, creating a legal entity, waiting for a multiple increase in their profits). It was obvious that it was necessary to divide the decisions into modules, form separate proposals for various segments, including various business models, pricing policies, and the operating system.

It’s unrealistic to quickly get competitor information in B2B. Yes, you know most of the competitors and their offers, but the price is always set individually, and it always depends on many reservations. In the best case scenario, you see figures about attracted customers, but there are practically no successful examples in our sector. We collected information about competitors at thematic exhibitions, interviewed our potential customers, conducted mystery shopping. If your sector has agencies that collect such data, buy without hesitation, this will help to focus your efforts.

Another problem that we encountered was that the retail solution was technically not ready either for copying in its entirety or for dividing into modules. Legacy code prevented it, a huge number of dependencies between the modules, the data warehouse did not require its use by several organizations, the use of AWS infrastructure was limited by low expertise.

If you are going to sell a technical solution for your retail to other companies, you will have to rebuild it to make it universal and, possibly, completely, because now it takes into account only your specific processes. This leads to significant financial and time development costs. The problem is precisely in the development time: even the most loyal client can fall off while you redo your solution for it, and the new client will have other priorities.


Burrowing into technical problems (we are FINTEH), we missed what kind of product we are trying to create. At this stage, it was necessary to understand what our company has and what allows us to compete with others - risk management, pricing and quality of transaction execution. We get prices from many market participants, on the basis of which we form our own liquidity, and then we offer this liquidity to traders, constantly evaluating our own risks and adjusting pricing algorithms. Understanding that our main product is just a financial product, it solved a lot of controversial issues and allowed us to create an MVP, a business model, determine exactly who our competitors are, what our offer is better than competitors' proposals, and also close legal issues (contract structure, requirements for due diligence).

As a result, we have formed a product line:

  • Basic offer. Direct liquidity supply through the FIX API and integration platforms;
  • Trading engine - if the client needs trading servers to use our liquidity, we provide them at cost price, and when the client brings us profit, we pay for this cost ourselves. Server setup, support, infrastructure costs, we undertake. The client will have to use our APIs for integration, just so that he does not flood the server due to inexperience;
  • White Label. Complete turnkey solution. For its creation, for three years we have been refining and refining our solution for the retail business and what we sell, use ourselves and constantly improve.

The key point here is to have a product with a short sales cycle and minimal integration efforts on the client side. Even if integration is reduced to copy-paste of one line, several months can pass before the conclusion of the contract. Passing the full cycle is critical to find out the problem areas in your OS (due diligence, contract, support team, mutual settlements, reporting to the client, reporting to the regulator).

The OS is a separate topic for discussion, and here a significant part of the expertise is absent in B2C companies. This expertise will have to be increased. B2B has a different sales cycle, the necessary level of support, additional legal expertise (instead of complaints on the forum, a dissatisfied client goes to court), etc.

For us, creating a B2B business was a long, expensive and sometimes painful process, which continues to this day. This process actualized many problems that otherwise we would never have solved. If you are ready to take this path, then at the end you will find business diversification through the coverage of fundamentally new markets and segments and a long-term competitive advantage in the retail business, which will allow you to confidently operate companies in any crisis.

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