Laoura: How did the company start?
Ilan: The first question, but actually the longest answer. It was started by myself and my first business partner Erik Voges, we were both doing our masters degree in the university of Cape Town and we were both doing our masters after working the corporate world for a number of years. We decided after a game of squash that we are tired of working for corporates and at the end of the game of squash we decided to start a company together and that was the start of Autochartist.
We bootstrapped the company with bespoke software development projects for the first 3 or 4 years during which we actually developed the initial version of Autochartist itself and then we went to market, so it was a lot of hard work with hand-to-mouth paychecks
Laoura: From initial concept to what the company is today – did it stay inline or change at all?
Ilan: I would love to say I was smart enough to see where the company would be in years time but the truth is it’s changed. Initially we launched a website looking at the Johannesburg stock exchange looking at technical patterns aimed at the retail exchange trader and we thought that we were going to release this website and be gazillionaires overnight. Anyway, when we sold the first subscription in 3 months, we realised that we were not going to be gazillionaires and it’s going to take something different.
It doesn’t work that way and we saw that we had to change.
Now we are a B2B company, we are not a B2C company and the product ranges have changed and it has transformed truely from where it started initially.
Laoura: What has shaped you along your journey or who has shaped you along your journey?
Ilan: I would say there have been quite a lot of influential people in my life. Obviously, my dad has been very influential on me, although he is an engineer, not an entrepreneur. He has shaped me a lot in his methodology and his discipline and the way he looks at things. Obviously I have had a lot of friends and colleagues that have shaped me. My current business partner Robert Horton, he’s really made me think like a businessman and not an engineer and over the last 15 years of the company’s existence that’s been the biggest change and growth for me changing my mind from an engineer to a businessman. It’s been the most interesting and fun thing to do, although I still do dabble in some engineering tasks but that’s merely because I love it so much and I’m interested. But the growth in the entrepreneurial and business side has been the biggest change in my life.
Laoura: Speaking of engineering and technology, we would describe Autochartist as game changers in the industry. How would you describe the journey to where Autochartist is today?
Ilan: Thank you for that comment, I really appreciate that. Interestingly enough I don’t really see myself as a ground breaker in the industry, although looking back we’ve lived through a lot of interesting times from the fintech-side. We started off as an installable windows application,and then we moved to a web application and now we are api driven and we’ve lived through copy-follow systems, we’ve lived through social trading, we’ve lived through a whole bunch of different phases in the industry and technology. And many companies have come and gone around us, and we are still around, so we are doing something right. I’m glad to say. I’m not sure if it’s by luck or smart decision making, I think probably more luck but I think we’ve always tried to stay true to what we want to do. We never wanted to be a me too company. There’s a lot of competitors out there that follow what we do and just monitor our website all the time and copy what we do. I think we are a bit different in that.
Laoura: ….That’s a compliment…
Ilan: I guess you’re right. For us, we’ve always invested highly into R&D. I guess that’s my engineering background. Whereas I get a lot of advice about saying ‘go sell more, go sell more, go sell more’ but because I’m passionate about R&D, about researching, about getting better products – that’s really been a critical thing. We’re always reinvesting, we’re always inventing new things and there are dozens of projects which have been mothballs, which we just haven’t taken them to market. But it doesn’t stop us from research and development. We do release new products and they seem to be accepted in the market and I guess for us that’s the big thing, the R&D department.
Laoura: …A lot about R&D is about learning and moving on to the next big idea. As you say, from some of those mothballs something else might develop and its part of the whole brainstorming process……
Ilan: Right and it’s about pushing the limits internally of the company’s capabilities. I think R&D is not only about getting a great idea but also how hard and how far you can push technology within your company. And I find that certainly fulfilling in the job that I do.
Laoura: Speaking of internally and the company, what kind of culture do you have at Autochartist, because from what I have experienced, you are all great fun and serious people?
Ilan: First and foremost we promote work hard, play hard. We don’t want you to be at work from 6 in the morning to 10 o’clock at night. We want you to work from 8-5 and during work time, we want you to work as hard as you can and after that switch-off, go and have family time – that’s very important to us. We are all family people, I think there are only a handful which don’t have families, so we promote and appreciate family constraints. Especially during this COVID stay at home on lock-down.
For us, although it’s been an adjustment to work from home, our attitude towards the challenges of having a family hasn’t changed because we have always been accommodating to our employees in terms of their family responsibilities. Also, another thing that’s been important for us, although there is a bit of a management structure, I like to think of ourselves as ego-less management. I dont think I’m the smartest guy in the company. In fact i’m definitely not the smartest guy, I got some super smart people working around me and that’s exactly what I want. I want these people to turn around and say – hey Ilan we are doing this the wrong way, this is the wrong strategy, this is the wrong product or we need these changes. I love how management challenges me and that’s extremely important for us as a culture – that openness and the last thing that’s really unique to us is that every one of my employees in the company knows how to trade. From assistants to marketing, to sales to developers, to management – everybody trades and knows how to trade. Which is so important as a culture because we live what our end-users live and that’s how we understand, and that’s how we come-up with new products. Unlike a lot of institutions out there that their sales people have never even opened up a trading platform and don’t know what it is or what its about. We try and live it all the time and so our entire company is all aligned about how to improve our products
Laoura: What would you say are some of the next big milestones. The company has been operating for many years and has obviously transformed itself a number of times. But what are the next big milestones that you would like to achieve?
Ilan: I think for us, the big change that’s coming right now is that we see our products still being used from an end-user perspective and a traders perspective, but more and more we see our products being used by internal business processes of brokers, whether their retention or sales. I think that’s an absolutely huge move for us as a company.
The second big thing which I see happening is that we are starting to win contracts over the large traditional media companies like Reuters, Dow Jones or Bloomberg. We are starting to beat those guys in terms of large content deals. And I think that these are massive milestones for us as a company. I don’t think one can say, we’ve achieved it, there’s always growth happening. A milestone is more of a fuzzy area than a line that you achieve. I think that certainly the company is going in the right direction in terms of challenging these big players from a content perspective.
Laoura: There is uncertainty around COVID-19 and how that’s affecting businesses. From an operational perspective obviously all of you are working from home. What other changes have you had to make? And what’s your opinion on how this will affect things from a global economic perspective?
Ilan: Right, I’ll give you my perspective along with the 10 million other perspectives people are reading about in the newspaper. Firstly, operationally we are a South African company and there are 2 challenges that we are faced with in South Africa that very few first world countries appreciate and that’s the quality of internet connectivity and the quality of electricity and reliability of electricity. So in fact it’s been a very interesting transition for us to work from home. It’s been more than just telling our employees to just start working from home. We’ve had to upgrade internet connectivity for our employees, we had to buy everyone generators for their houses because we get these electricity brown-outs or power failures for hours everyday. So having a little UPS for 30mins just doesn’t do it. We actually went out and bought generators for our operational staff.Operationally it’s been a very interesting experience. Logistically quite interesting but I think we are now there. Obviously it’s only been the first week of the lockdown, especially South Africa is really locked down, people can’t even walk outside so it’s been a challenge.
As a company, or let’s just say in the financial industry we look at the market, the exchange traded industry and the OTC industry, I guess the outlook is or should be different in those two. Obviously our brokers are seeing massive volumes at the moment. The kind of double edge sword, the other side of that, is that our brokers are seeing a lot of margin calls, so although traders are trading a lot, they are seeing a lot of loss of customers. Now, that is very concerning and you know once you’ve had a bad taste of something, a bad experience, it’s very difficult to come back. So really I think that, or i’m hoping that certainly we are promoting some of our risk management tools to our brokers, and we are getting some brokers to listen “Hey, this is actually the time to start looking after your traders, to make sure that they manage their risk because volatility is so high, it’s easy to lose your cash so quickly and then you’ll step away and never come back to the industry.
On the exchange traded side, I guess there’s less of that kind of risk because people don’t get the same level of leverage as they do in the OTC industry and the reports from our exchange brokers is that obviously volumes are up and leads are up and deposits are up and everyone wants to get involved so that’s a good thing. Although, again the other side of that globally, economically speaking there’s gonna be a lot of loss of jobs and a loss of personal income. So medium term and long term how much expendable income is there gonna be for speculative trade, right? There’s always your retirement funds and that’s a totally different story altogether but in terms of having a few thousand dollars to speculatively trade the market, where are we gonna be three months from now or six months from now and how much spare cash are you gonna have to do that kind of speculative trading? Some people argue that those people are gamblers and they’ll always have that money. Other people say, well no, those people are not gamblers they are actually people that are trying to get their hard earned money and make a quick turn back. And really the question is where are they gonna be in three months or six months from now, and how much of that, shall we say ‘expendable income,’ are they gonna have.
Ilan: So I think that certainly the message that we are putting out to our brokers is – look after your traders, make sure they are not over-exposing themselves, make sure they are managing their risk.
Laoura: I know you have a great tool for helping, not only generating leads but also helping that churn, which is your automated social media. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that and how important you think the role social media plays in our lives now? Especially now that everyone is at home.
Ilan: I think that social media has always played an important role in our lives. You cant have an interest in something, a hobby or anything, whether it’s cooking or baking or repairing your car or whatever it happens to be, you can’t have a hobby without being a part of a social media group right? It’s now part of our lives and I think it’s gonna continue to be part of our lives. You know, I have personally never seen or never been a huge social media fun. I use it for my interests and hobbies but I don’t spend an excessive amount of time on it. But now that everyones stuck at home, I have even personally been going more into social media online presence and interacting with people more online and I think it’s natural. It’s times like this that we realise actually how social human-beings are. We are a social animal, we need to be with each other, playing with each other, eating and communicating together and it’s extremely difficult to do that from home, right? So, just our involvement in social media is expanding and I think that any industry, we are talking about the financial industry now, but any industry should be exposing themselves more on social media. And I guess, to your point about our social media, yes we have a social media product. We have this kind of natural language generation technology that posts important market updates and market commentary based on economic events or technical and macroeconomic events in a kind of natural language speaking tone and so I think the idea there, is to provide our customers with additional presence online, within social media or generally online without incurring the additional expenses of hiring writers and translators and that kind of thing. It’s a very cost effective way of more presence and more content online.
Laoura: …So you are providing this product? And how does my content differ from other brokers’ content?
Ilan: Ah, right. I think you hit on a very important point. I mean, this is a huge thing right? So if your company subscribes to Dow Jones, Bloombergs or Reuters or any other companies, you can’t really use their stuff online because you get penalised from an SEO perspective. So I think that that’s something we’ve tried to do using technology – obviously that’s our core competence. We are not writers, but what we have is these smart computers that generate what we call natural language content. So we’ve got thousands of different combinations of saying or expressing market events, so although we are not able to produce 100% unique results for every broker, I think we are able to produce over 99% or 99.3% uniqueness. So there’s a 0.7% chance of having the same content as another broker or bringing the multilanguage aspect into it because we don’t only do this in english, we do it in another six or seven other languages. The likelihood is really really small that one broker will have the same content as another broker that they post online. So I think that that kind of technology has been very interesting, and I guess that’s the R&D side of the business coming in, we wouldn’t be producing this kind of cutting edge stuff if it wasn’t for our R&D department. And at the end of the day, even though R&D is a huge investment for us we think we do get the reward. We are wasting a lot of time and effort in it, but I think it’s worth it because it’s pushing us to a new level beyond even the big players.
Laoura: Yes I can see how that would hugely benefit your clients with saving time and money and obviously people are so current now that they want content in an instant. So if you are delivering that, you could really help the broker.
Ilan: There’s some really amazing stuff being done at the moment. I think that two or three of our customers have even taken it to a new level. They are using our natural language generated content to push our content into their online digital adverts. So the adverts are no longer saying hey, try it out, free demo account and blah blah blah. They are actually giving out real content inside the adverts, right? So I wish I actually came up with that, even though it was one of our customers, but it’s really the next level in terms of digital online presence, right?
Laoura: Who does Autochartist cater to? Which specific industries do you think that these tools could apply to?
Ilan: I think again, you are raising very interesting points. We are stuck with the stigma of being in the OTC space. But the truth is that we are very well established in the equity space as well. Especially in central europe and the UK. We have one or two very large customers in the US as well as in equities trading, so I think that, actually I should have spoken about this earlier when you asked me about the milestones question, is that we are trying hard, and slowly slowly succeeding in getting rid of the stigma about being in FX only, we are in equities, we do a lot of work in futures especially in Asia, we are doing a lot more on the crypto side. So really from an asset class perspective we are covering crypto, currencies, futures, equities, ETFs, there’s a lot of stuff we are covering. We even cover debt instruments, treasuries and stuff although one could argue that technical and statistical analysis of those is not really relevant but certainly we look into things like macroeconomic indicators as well. So we are covering macro topics which obviously have an effect on interest rates and stuff like that so definitely that’s a challenge and something we are working really hard towards in getting rid of this fx only stigma that we have.
Laoura: Ok so I have two more questions for you. One is how do you describe yourself in one word?
Ilan: You are smiling, you were nervous about this question.
Laoura: Kept it to the end.
Ilan: You cannot describe a complex person like me in one word.
Laoura: Maybe that’s just it. Complex.
Ilan: Actually i’m a simple guy. I am a colourful character, I am a little bit of a nutball, not wearing a bowtie for this interview but…
Laoura: Maybe the next one
Ilan: Maybe the next one, yeah. I am an interesting mix of entrepreneur and technology geek and I guess there’s just not one word but…
Laoura: It’s good enough.
Ilan: I love learning about all kinds of things. And I’m a very open minded individual. I love talking to people that are intelligent.
Laoura: You are loving this interview.
Ilan: It’s very rare for me to be able to express myself and give out my views. I always have a lot of opinions about things. So, yeah I’m enjoying this.
Laoura: Well I’m sad to end the interview. But last question for you and it’s kind of a follow up to your previous answer. Apart from world domination (laughs) what’s next for Autochartist?
Ilan: It’s always interesting to ask a business owner what’s next, especially when you know your competitors are gonna be listening to this interview. We have a lot of competitors out there that literally monitor and copy exactly what we do. So I’m always hesitant to express that, but I can tell you that there’s a ton of exciting stuff happening in the content and media space. I think you’re gonna see us competing more and more against those big, ‘traditionally big’ media players and I think you’re gonna see a lot more of us on the content production side.
Laoura: Fantastic. Well thank you very much and we’ll tell everyone watch this space.