Having secured licenses in the US and Singapore, Tiger Brokers and Futu seek to compete with some of the established market players like eToro and Robinhood.
While Chinese authorities have been going tough on the local crypto market, the local brokerage firms are seeing a big opportunity in the overseas markets. Chinese online brokerage companies like Futu and Tiger Brokers are looking to get a share of the global crypto markets.
As per the CNBC report, both these companies have applied licenses of crypto trading service providers in the US and Singapore. Both these players have been testing waters in these markets and have seen strong customer demand. Following the massive rally in the crypto market earlier this year, the crypto trading activity has surged to a new high.
In fact, prime markets like the US and Singapore are expanding further with more retail and institutional participation. On the other hand, Chinese regulators have taken a tough stand citing major speculation. Speaking to the media last week, Arthur Chen, Futu’s chief financial officer, said:
“We do hear a lot of interest from our users across the world in terms of crypto. We have listened to that”.
Recently, Futu also announced that it has touched a new milestone of 100,000 paying clients in Singapore. The company attained this milestone in just under three months after launching its services on March 8, 2021, in Singapore. Futu’s digital trading platform moomoo is getting strong significance in the country.
Futu and Tiger Brokers Competing with the US Players
Although the opportunities are much, it’s not going to be much easy for the two Chinese brokers to gain market share in the already competitive crypto trading market in the US giants like Coinbase have gained a significant market share while attracting some of the biggest institutional players.
Besides, Coinbase has been expanding its services after going for a public listing in April 2021. On the other hand, popular trading platforms like Robinhood have substantially increased their market share over the last year. In 2021 so far, Robinhood has been adding 3 million customers every month for its crypto business.
Both Futu and Tiger Brokers are listed in the US. The companies have had their presence in the US for some time now. Thus, it won’t be much difficult for them to tap new customers. In its recent earnings call, Tiger said that its customers and deposits doubled during Q1 2020.
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