Capital opportunity for new spreadbetting boss
London Capital Group chief executive Kevin Ashby
WHEN former Saxo Bank Asia chief executive Kevin Ashby first stepped foot inside the Devonshire Square headquarters of spreadbetting firm Capital Spreads last March, there was little to suggest he would later be installed as the boss of its parent company London Capital Group.
“It only became apparent the day the CEO [Mark Slade] resigned,” he says, sitting in the company’s offices on a cold, damp Thursday morning.
Ashby, who oversees a business of about 80 people, took over the Aim-listed firm at a time of great upheaval.
Slade had left the firm after just six months, and with the company still reeling from a £200,000 half-year loss in 2012, Ashby has been quick to put the firm on a different footing and map a new path for the business.
“What we have to do is come up with innovation. That’s what we’ve spent the last six months doing,” he says. “We’ve been identifying different technology companies that create specific functionality that we can then harness.”
Social media is one the main functions Ashby wants to integrate into Capital Spreads’ platform, as well as ensuring a better experience for customers.
“How do you make sure that when Carl Icahn tweets that he’s about to buy Apple stock it reaches the customer? A lot of it is now focused on how can you harness technologies. It has becoming a different industry,” he says. Indeed. The spread betting industry is a small but incredibly competitive sector. Despite the dominance of market leader IG Group, Capital Spreads competes with ETX Capital, CMC Markets and City Index to nab punters eager to trade. Ashby, however, says the main threat is from aggressive new entrants muscling in to grab customers.
“We have to do more to maintain clients’ interests and give them tools to make better decisions” he says. “We don’t do the high-pressure stuff. That churn model is not something morally I like. If you give someone the ability to do five hundred times leverage on their trades you are giving them a fully loaded machine gun pointed at themselves.”
He says current legislation for UK-based spread betters is appropriate but warns of weaknesses in the marketing of non-UK companies.
“At a European level, anybody who has set up an operation anywhere can legally market into the UK. A number of those companies carry out activities that we would not carry out as a regulated FCA entity,” he warns.
With Ashby’s focus on innovation taking centre stage, and the market in flux, the battle lines are only now just being drawn.
CV KEVIN ASHBY
■ Date of birth: 1958
■ Born: Barking
■ Education: Mayesbrook Comprehensive
■ First job: Haymarket Publishing, 1976
■ Lives: London and Surrey
■ Favourite music: Modern Jazz
■ Favourite books: Crime fiction (Harlan Coben, Frederick Forsyth)
■ Favourite food: Asian cuisine (Tom Yum soup)
■ Hobbies: Cooking and DIY
■ Best business book: Winning by Jack Welch