About

CMC Markets was founded in London in 1989 to provide retail investors the same terms enjoyed by large institutions.¹ Now, it is a global online financial trading firm and one of the world’s leading contract for differences (CFD) and share-trading providers.¹

Decades later, CMC Invest was launched in Singapore, building upon the heritage and the same promise to retail investors—transparent pricing and low costs—through technology and innovation.²

The challenge

With approval to roll out in Singapore, CMC Invest needed a dynamic back-end infrastructure to build out an investor ecosystem that enabled its users to trade in real time. Building its own infrastructure would have taken a significant amount of time and resources, in addition to the local regulations and complexities.

The solution

Leveraging real-time virtual sub-ledger capabilities, CMC Invest co-created a wallet infrastructure with J.P. Morgan Payments. This infrastructure, powered by an application programming interface (API), enables CMC Invest to automate digital wallet management on its investment platform through a single bank account, while delivering a real-time and superior experience for its users.

The infrastructure integrated CMC Invest's bank account with J.P. Morgan, enabling direct connection to the local payment rails for Singapore dollars (SGD)—Faster and Secure Transfers (FAST). Identification and management of the end-to-end flow funds and reconciliation is seamless, instant and fully automated.

By managing an infinite number of payments in real time on any platform with one single bank account, clients can increase the ease and efficiency of allocating funds, paying counterparties or even rewarding customer loyalty. Just as in the case of CMC Invest, it can be quick and easy to implement using APIs, while having the flexibility to adapt to new processes and markets.

J.P. Morgan also has access to vast global payment rails that their clients can utilize effectively to facilitate domestic and international payments across multiple currencies.

The results

With the infrastructure in place, users on the CMC Invest platform enjoy a real-time trading experience and instant reflection of funds in digital wallets for both deposits and withdrawals, alleviating the need to check when funds have been debited into trading or bank accounts. Topping up of their wallets can also be done instantly using various payment methods, so users can easily start trading immediately upon signup. Such a seamless experience for users is a defining differentiator for CMC Invest against other trading platforms.

While CMC Invest currently supports trades in SGD, it looks to expand to trades in other currencies as its user base grows. This flexible infrastructure scales together, expanding into new markets easily.