Ahmad Said
has a particular way of explaining what’s wrong with most trading platforms.
“Deployed in the cloud isn’t the same as cloud-native,” he told
FinanceMagnates.com. “Most platforms in this space were adapted to the
cloud. Helio was built from day one as active/active, multi-region
infrastructure, no failover dependency, no single point of failure, and
zero-downtime deployments as standard.”
Singapore Summit: Meet the largest APAC brokers you know (and those you still don’t!)
That
distinction, between adaptation and original design, is the founding argument
of Fintake, Said’s Cyprus-based broker technology startup. The company launched
Helio, its first cloud-native trading platform for CFD, OTC, and crypto
brokers, this month. Competitors covered the announcement as a product launch.
The more interesting story is what Said built it from.
The 2 AM Architecture
Decision
Said spent
four years at Pepperstone, where he joined as the first engineering hire in
Cyprus and built a team of more than 20 engineers. The work included one of the
first large-scale TradingView broker integrations, Pepperstone’s proprietary trading platform,
and its mobile app.
By the time
he left in 2024, he was Head of Engineering for the EMEA region. “I’ve
spent years running high-volume trading systems, including one of the largest
integrations with TradingView,” he said. “I’ve seen where platforms
break because I’ve been the one fixing them at 2 AM. Helio was built to make
that call unnecessary.”
That
operational experience shaped every architectural decision in Helio. Both of
the platform’s geographic regions run simultaneously, not in a
primary/secondary configuration where one waits for the other to fail. Updates
deploy mid-session, during live trading, without interruption.
“Both
regions are live simultaneously,” Said said. When Said first
announced Fintake at the end of 2024, he described the problem plainly: “Many
brokers I know feel trapped in a ‘marriage of inconvenience’ with their
providers, staying only because better options don’t exist.” Helio is his
answer to that.
Selling Resilience With
the Power Off
Fintake’s
approach to sales is unusual. Rather than pointing brokers at uptime statistics
or SLA documentation, Said shuts things down and lets prospects watch. “We
provide contractual SLAs, but we don’t rely on PDFs alone,” he adderd.
“We run live chaos testing, including killing availability zones and
entire regions, to show brokers exactly how the platform behaves under stress,
in real time. That includes deploying mid-session, during live trading, without
interruption.”
The
approach is partly commercial, partly regulatory. More than a
year after DORA came into force, many brokers are still playing catch-up with the EU’s Digital
Operational Resilience Act, which requires firms to demonstrate, not just
document, their ability to withstand ICT disruptions.
Said says
Helio was designed around that requirement from the start. “DORA is about
proving resilience, not just documenting it,” he said. “Helio gives
brokers audit-ready visibility, built-in security, SSO, 2FA, and the ability to
demonstrate how their platform performs under failure scenarios, not just claim
it.”
A Crowded Market Moving in
the Same Direction
The trading
platform market in 2026 remains dominated by MT5, cTrader, and DXtrade, with newer
entrants pressing hard for share. Match-Trader
reported a 290% increase in server clients since January 2024, reflecting the appetite among
brokers for alternatives to the MetaQuotes ecosystem.
DXtrade and
cTrader have been competing aggressively on mobile and prop trading features, with both platforms releasing
updates within days of each other earlier this year, while Devexperts has
been building out a full prop-ready stack around DXtrade through third-party
integrations.
The scale of what Fintake is entering should not be
understated. MT5 now runs on roughly 68% of global brokerages, having
finally surpassed MT4 in trading volume in Q1 2025 after two decades of MT4
dominance. Alternative platforms, including cTrader, DXtrade, and Match-Trader,
collectively grew their share to around 27% by Q1 2025, with Match-Trader alone reporting a 290% jump in server clients since
January 2024.
Said sees
that movement as validation but thinks it stops short. “Connectivity and
execution hubs are building trading platforms and APIs,” he said publicly
before the Helio launch. “Trading platform vendors are building their own
liquidity hubs. Everyone is chasing more control, more agility, and fewer
dependencies.”
His
argument is that chasing control on top of adapted architecture still leaves
the original fragility intact. The platform’s API-first,
front-end agnostic design means brokers can connect their own interfaces or use Helio’s own,
without being locked into a vendor front-end.
With a growing
share of CFD brokers now looking at multi-asset and futures pivots under pressure from regulators
and US competition, Fintake enters the market at a point when brokers are
actively questioning their existing infrastructure choices.
Pricing
competition is also intensifying at the entry level. Leverate
recently moved to a free-to-start model for CFD brokerage technology, targeting firms hesitant about
switching costs, a sign that even established vendors feel pressure to remove
barriers for new or migrating clients.
The Integration Nobody’s
Named Yet
One of the
more closely watched elements of Fintake’s roadmap is an unannounced social
trading partnership, currently in what Said described as final testing.
“It’s
a major global ecosystem, designed to drive acquisition and engagement for
brokers on the platform,” he said. “The integration is deep and
native, not a widget layer. Currently in final testing phases.”
He
confirmed Fintake will name the partner within weeks. TradingView has become
the most sought-after front-end integration in the sector, with brokers of all
sizes racing to connect their back-end infrastructure to TradingView’s charting
and social layer,
though Fintake did not confirm whether its unnamed partner is TradingView.
The
platform’s broader roadmap includes crypto spot trading, on-chain liquidity
access, and updated web and mobile interfaces, all built as native extensions
of the multi-asset framework rather than separate product lines.
On
traction, Said kept it brief. “We’re currently in pilot with a small
number of brokers and will share more detail soon,” he said, declining to
name any of the firms involved.
Ahmad Said
has a particular way of explaining what’s wrong with most trading platforms.
“Deployed in the cloud isn’t the same as cloud-native,” he told
FinanceMagnates.com. “Most platforms in this space were adapted to the
cloud. Helio was built from day one as active/active, multi-region
infrastructure, no failover dependency, no single point of failure, and
zero-downtime deployments as standard.”
Singapore Summit: Meet the largest APAC brokers you know (and those you still don’t!)
That
distinction, between adaptation and original design, is the founding argument
of Fintake, Said’s Cyprus-based broker technology startup. The company launched
Helio, its first cloud-native trading platform for CFD, OTC, and crypto
brokers, this month. Competitors covered the announcement as a product launch.
The more interesting story is what Said built it from.
The 2 AM Architecture
Decision
Said spent
four years at Pepperstone, where he joined as the first engineering hire in
Cyprus and built a team of more than 20 engineers. The work included one of the
first large-scale TradingView broker integrations, Pepperstone’s proprietary trading platform,
and its mobile app.
By the time
he left in 2024, he was Head of Engineering for the EMEA region. “I’ve
spent years running high-volume trading systems, including one of the largest
integrations with TradingView,” he said. “I’ve seen where platforms
break because I’ve been the one fixing them at 2 AM. Helio was built to make
that call unnecessary.”
That
operational experience shaped every architectural decision in Helio. Both of
the platform’s geographic regions run simultaneously, not in a
primary/secondary configuration where one waits for the other to fail. Updates
deploy mid-session, during live trading, without interruption.
“Both
regions are live simultaneously,” Said said. When Said first
announced Fintake at the end of 2024, he described the problem plainly: “Many
brokers I know feel trapped in a ‘marriage of inconvenience’ with their
providers, staying only because better options don’t exist.” Helio is his
answer to that.
Selling Resilience With
the Power Off
Fintake’s
approach to sales is unusual. Rather than pointing brokers at uptime statistics
or SLA documentation, Said shuts things down and lets prospects watch. “We
provide contractual SLAs, but we don’t rely on PDFs alone,” he adderd.
“We run live chaos testing, including killing availability zones and
entire regions, to show brokers exactly how the platform behaves under stress,
in real time. That includes deploying mid-session, during live trading, without
interruption.”
The
approach is partly commercial, partly regulatory. More than a
year after DORA came into force, many brokers are still playing catch-up with the EU’s Digital
Operational Resilience Act, which requires firms to demonstrate, not just
document, their ability to withstand ICT disruptions.
Said says
Helio was designed around that requirement from the start. “DORA is about
proving resilience, not just documenting it,” he said. “Helio gives
brokers audit-ready visibility, built-in security, SSO, 2FA, and the ability to
demonstrate how their platform performs under failure scenarios, not just claim
it.”
A Crowded Market Moving in
the Same Direction
The trading
platform market in 2026 remains dominated by MT5, cTrader, and DXtrade, with newer
entrants pressing hard for share. Match-Trader
reported a 290% increase in server clients since January 2024, reflecting the appetite among
brokers for alternatives to the MetaQuotes ecosystem.
DXtrade and
cTrader have been competing aggressively on mobile and prop trading features, with both platforms releasing
updates within days of each other earlier this year, while Devexperts has
been building out a full prop-ready stack around DXtrade through third-party
integrations.
The scale of what Fintake is entering should not be
understated. MT5 now runs on roughly 68% of global brokerages, having
finally surpassed MT4 in trading volume in Q1 2025 after two decades of MT4
dominance. Alternative platforms, including cTrader, DXtrade, and Match-Trader,
collectively grew their share to around 27% by Q1 2025, with Match-Trader alone reporting a 290% jump in server clients since
January 2024.
Said sees
that movement as validation but thinks it stops short. “Connectivity and
execution hubs are building trading platforms and APIs,” he said publicly
before the Helio launch. “Trading platform vendors are building their own
liquidity hubs. Everyone is chasing more control, more agility, and fewer
dependencies.”
His
argument is that chasing control on top of adapted architecture still leaves
the original fragility intact. The platform’s API-first,
front-end agnostic design means brokers can connect their own interfaces or use Helio’s own,
without being locked into a vendor front-end.
With a growing
share of CFD brokers now looking at multi-asset and futures pivots under pressure from regulators
and US competition, Fintake enters the market at a point when brokers are
actively questioning their existing infrastructure choices.
Pricing
competition is also intensifying at the entry level. Leverate
recently moved to a free-to-start model for CFD brokerage technology, targeting firms hesitant about
switching costs, a sign that even established vendors feel pressure to remove
barriers for new or migrating clients.
The Integration Nobody’s
Named Yet
One of the
more closely watched elements of Fintake’s roadmap is an unannounced social
trading partnership, currently in what Said described as final testing.
“It’s
a major global ecosystem, designed to drive acquisition and engagement for
brokers on the platform,” he said. “The integration is deep and
native, not a widget layer. Currently in final testing phases.”
He
confirmed Fintake will name the partner within weeks. TradingView has become
the most sought-after front-end integration in the sector, with brokers of all
sizes racing to connect their back-end infrastructure to TradingView’s charting
and social layer,
though Fintake did not confirm whether its unnamed partner is TradingView.
The
platform’s broader roadmap includes crypto spot trading, on-chain liquidity
access, and updated web and mobile interfaces, all built as native extensions
of the multi-asset framework rather than separate product lines.
On
traction, Said kept it brief. “We’re currently in pilot with a small
number of brokers and will share more detail soon,” he said, declining to
name any of the firms involved.
