For much of the brokerage industry’s recent history, investment followed visibility. Trading platforms became the defining battleground — sleek multi-asset interfaces, mobile-first dashboards, and intuitive user experiences absorbed the bulk of capital and marketing attention. The back end, by contrast, was largely overlooked. The industry is now confronting the consequences of that decision.
According to Muinmos, in a recent panel discussion, Muinmos CEO Remonda Kirketerp-Møller joined Integral director of product Julian Elliott and moderator Andrew Saks to examine where brokerages stand today and what must change.
Muinmos recently discussed what is the brokerage technology reckoning, and why the back end can no longer be an afterthought.
The conversation covered technology stack strategy, the emergence of new asset classes, and the trajectory of real-time regulatory oversight. A consistent message ran through the entire discussion: the brokerages best positioned for the future are those treating infrastructure as a strategic asset, not a line item to be minimised.
A legacy of misplaced priorities
Kirketerp-Møller was unsparing about how the industry reached this point. Major institutional players — Saxo Bank, Interactive Brokers, CMC Markets — built deep, proprietary trading infrastructure from the outset, and that foundation has served them well. The retail wave that followed took a very different path.
Muinmos CEO Remonda Kirketerp-Møller said, “Enormous amounts of money went into the front end. Multi-asset trading platforms became a core requirement, and that is where massive IT resources were invested. It unfortunately neglected a great deal of back-office operations — and that neglect is one of the reasons we see so many issues today with regulatory reporting and the volume of manual work that continues.”
Many retail brokerages entered the market from adjacent sectors — affiliate marketing, for instance — without the capital base or FinTech foundation to build from scratch. White-label, off-the-shelf solutions filled the gap. The result was technology hosted on third-party servers, with limited ownership of client data and virtually no capacity to adapt as conditions changed. As regulatory demands have grown and new asset classes have emerged, the fragmentation inherent in that approach has become a serious operational and reputational liability.
Stop building what you are not built to build
One of the sharpest points in the discussion concerned the tendency of institutions to invest in bespoke infrastructure that is neither their core competency nor a scalable asset.
Muinmos CEO Remonda Kirketerp-Møller said, “There is no question that institutions should stop building this type of infrastructure themselves. Expert technology companies exist precisely to do this and they do it at scale. Many institutions do not realise that the system they have built cannot simply be extracted and deployed elsewhere. It is not portable.”
The commercial consequences of this are frequently underestimated. When a firm built on a bespoke proprietary system approaches a sale or public listing, auditors will examine where client data sits and where the intellectual property resides. If the answer involves a third-party vendor’s server or a system inseparable from the institution’s own legacy architecture, the impact on valuation is material. The alternative — a well-structured platform from a specialist software provider, deployed on the broker’s own infrastructure — offers genuine IP ownership, full flexibility, and the ability to accommodate new front ends and asset classes without the cost or delay of building from scratch. Given that bespoke development timelines often outlast the window of opportunity for emerging trends, the investment case for proprietary infrastructure is weaker than it appears.
The expertise gap
Kirketerp-Møller also identified a structural talent problem: a shortage of professionals who understand both financial services and modern technology. Domain expertise alone was sufficient in the industry’s earlier years. That is no longer the case. AI agents, open APIs, and MCP servers are no longer the preserve of specialist engineering teams — they are shaping how brokerages interact with clients, manage data, and engage with regulators. Elliott noted that at a recent industry event in Dubai, very few brokerages were familiar with MCP servers, even as technology providers were already building that capability into their back-end systems.
Muinmos CEO Remonda Kirketerp-Møller said, “Hiring domain experts who cannot engage with the technology will still leave significant gaps. Institutions need to hire people who understand and can leverage technological capabilities — not just people who understand the domain.”
The implication for business leaders is clear: technology strategy cannot be delegated entirely to a CTO or a development team. Those at the top need to understand what is being built, what is being bought, and whether it will remain fit for purpose over an 18-month horizon.
New asset classes and the first-mover dilemma
The panel turned to the challenge of new asset classes, with crypto perpetuals as the current example. Elliott attributed broker hesitation largely to uncertainty — unclear revenue projections, ambiguous regulatory treatment, and the difficulty of onboarding a new product onto a technology stack not designed for rapid adaptation. Yet the panel was equally clear about the risk of inaction. Should regulators move to restrict or substantially alter CFD treatment, crypto perpetuals represent a credible alternative. Critical mass may still be 12 to 18 months away — but brokers who have not had the technology conversation by then will be poorly positioned to respond.
The broader dynamic, as Saks observed, is the so-called Tesla effect: meaningful disruption rarely originates from within an incumbent industry. It arrives from the outside, faster than established players anticipate, and it resets user expectations for everyone. The intuitive, API-first experience that crypto exchanges have normalised is already shaping what a new generation of traders considers standard. Legacy-dependent platforms will struggle to keep pace.
Where regulatory oversight is heading
Perhaps the most forward-looking element of the conversation concerned the trajectory of regulatory supervision. Kirketerp-Møller described a near-term future in which regulators move beyond retrospective auditing to real-time oversight — monitoring not just trading behaviour, but the architecture of the platforms themselves.
Muinmos CEO Remonda Kirketerp-Møller said, “If I am a regulator auditing institution A, I will expect certain behaviour and certain standards. I will expect the same in institution B. That creates a very strong incentive for institutions to use compliant, standardised platforms from expert technology providers.”
For the build-vs-buy debate, this has direct implications. A bespoke system developed to an institution’s own standards may not satisfy the emerging regulatory expectation of standardised, auditable behaviour. A platform built by a specialist RegTech provider — one that works directly with regulators to translate compliance requirements into code-ready logic — occupies a fundamentally different position. Muinmos works on precisely this: embedding regulatory logic into the technology stack rather than adding it retrospectively.
The connectivity imperative
A final theme running through the discussion was connectivity. Regulatory reporting, onboarding, KYC, AML, and investor protection all require data to flow coherently across systems. The AI agents now central to next-generation automation cannot function effectively without an underlying communication network to support them. Without that connectivity, fragmentation persists regardless of how capable individual tools might be.
The efficiency gains from getting this right are not incremental. Tasks that might occupy a compliance professional for a full day — data extraction, analysis, reporting — can be completed in seconds by a well-integrated system. That is not a marginal improvement; it is a competitive differentiator.
The brokerages that will succeed are not necessarily those with the most polished front end. They are those with the most coherent, connected, and compliant back-end infrastructure — systems capable of adapting as both the market and the regulatory environment continue to evolve. That conversation, as the panel was clear to note, belongs in the boardroom and the CEO’s office, not only in the technology team.
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