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October 3, 2022

How to Build a Stock Trading Platform

Do you get fascinated by stocks and now want to build a stock trading platform? Anyone can build a trading platform, but not everyone can build a stock trading platform that delivers on its promise!

A stock trading platform has many moving parts, including development, financials, business development, and more. This article will explain the steps to building a stock trading platform that rocks!

What’s a Stock Trading Platform?

If you’re here, you probably already know what it is, but it’s important to reiterate for this piece. A trading platform is a software that serves as an online marketplace where users have the functionality to buy and sell financial products over a network.

Financial products traded on trading platforms include cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on stock trading platforms. Going by the definition above, they’re platforms where users can place orders for company stocks listed on the stock exchange.

Aside from allowing you to buy a part of a company from anywhere in the world. stock trading platforms provide analytical data on stock price changes. Whether you’re buying or not, you can browse the platform for anything of interest.

Steps to Build A Stock Trading Platform

A successful stock trading platform meets user needs in terms of functionality, user experience, and security. These aren’t simple tasks to achieve but they’re doable with these steps we’re about to show you.

Do your research
Set up a business team
Define your audience
Create a business plan
Hire a development team
Do Your Research

Before you even hire a software developer or a development team to build your trading platform, you must first do your research on existing platforms. Find out what the successful ones are doing right and what the least successful ones are doing wrong.

Check out their fees, customer base, and what their users say about these platforms on user boards and social media. User-generated data are essential to building a truly user-focused trading platform.

Go a step further by downloading their apps and using them. You can hear all about something but won’t fully understand its effect unless you experience it yourself. And remember to keep a note of everything you find because you’ll need it for the next step.

Set Up The Business Team

A stock trading platform is an online marketplace that needs to run around the clock. For it to serve customers 24/7, the business end must be working like a well-oiled machine.

You’ll need people to handle research, financials, business analysis, human resource, platform security, operations, and customer service. These are just a few, but how big your team is would depend on your funding. What counts is that you hire the best your money and negotiation skills can afford.

In the beginning, you may start with a few key people handling the fundamentals. But as you grow and progress in building your stock trading platform, your team would need to expand to accommodate the growth and prevent fatiguing your current hands.

And before growth comes, even before you start building anything or trying to find funding, there’s one essential task that you and your business team mustn’t overlook. And that’s creating a business plan.

Define Your Audience

The first step in a user-centered venture is conducting a target user analysis. Who’s your ideal customer, and do they prefer android, iOS, or web platforms? What features do they need, and how much are they typically willing to spend?

Answering these questions will help you define the type of trading platform you want to build. If your target users are low-income or middle-income earners, you’d want to build a platform with minimal fees and minimal feature offerings that wouldn’t cost much.

And if you hope to serve high-income earners who wouldn’t mind paying extra for certain features, you’ll go all out in designing a trading platform with premium features. If you decide to set high transaction fees, it wouldn’t be a problem as you’ll be offering commensurate services to your users.

Create a Business Plan

Building a trading platform is not charity work. Whether you’re getting funding from a benevolent deity or not, you must set out to make a profit. The first step to doing that is by getting your business team to write a business plan.

A business plan is a specialized document that states what your business is about, your business goals, how you hope to achieve them and speculated results. You must include sections such as business background, project vision, business opportunity, business objectives, success metrics, monetization model, and limitations.

Without a business plan, you wouldn’t have what to show investors you might be courting or those who are interested in your trading platform. Your plan shows them what you want to do and how you plan to achieve this. It’ll also show them if they’ll be able to make returns if they invest with you.

Other than investor proposition, a business plan is an important document that every top member of your team must have. It’s the one document they’ll be able to refer to when making decisions or designing the product.

Hire A Development Team

This next step is crucial to building the best stock trading platform. A top-notch development team is what will take your platform from the ideation stage to a fully operational product.

A qualified software development team will ensure your trading platform is built to your desired specification. They would include all the right features for your audience and put them where it’ll be easier to find.

Users often complain about complicated user interfaces. Some developers believe that the more features and buttons, the merrier. But in truth, less is always more because how users are able to interact with your platform can either make or break your success.

Your development team should have DevOps engineers, testers, Swift developers for iOS development, Android developers with Java skills or languages such as Python, JavaScript developers for web development, and UI designers. You should focus on making this team as collaborative as possible, as all hands must be on deck.

Conclusion

Building a trading platform requires you to define your business scope, set up a business team, do your research, hire a software development team and consider your features carefully. To build the best is tedious, but it becomes less daunting once you have the funding, information, plan, and team to back your dream up.

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