TradAir is revamping its business to offer technology solutions for the crypto market, a move that coincides with senior management changes at the firm.

When TradAir co-founder, Illit Geller, stepped down as CEO of the firm in June 2017, co-founder, Ayal Jedeikin stepped in to lead the company until the role of CEO was filled by Viral Tolat in May 2018.

However, Tolat has now vacated this role, resulting in Jedeikin once again taking the reins. Profit & Loss understands that Tolat will remain a “strategic advisor” to the TradAir board.

This change in management, combined with some departures from the London office, such as the firm’s COO, Bob Ejodame, sparked rumours that TradAir was closing its London office and consolidating all its staff in its Tel Aviv headquarters.

However, speaking to Profit & Loss Jedeikin denies that this is the case, stating that the firm is maintaining its sales presence in London, but consolidating the support and operations functions to the Tel Aviv office. He claims that, given Tel Aviv is only two hours ahead of London, it is more efficient to run the support and operations from Tel Aviv and simply work later into the day if necessary.

Another point of speculation has been that TradAir is shifting its focus away from traditional FX and towards the crypto space, something that Jedeikin also says is inaccurate.

“There have been rumours because of management changes, we don’t concern ourselves with them too much as we are far too focused on the business” he explains. “We have indeed pushed into crypto but this doesn’t mean that we’re neglecting the FX business. From a sales, operations and business perspective, there’s no shift. On the development side we are focusing more on crypto because of high client demand while our FX product is already mature”

Jedeikin says that TradAir identified the crypto markets as an opportunity for the firm in early 2017, before the price began spiking dramatically and adds that Tolat was a big proponent of pushing into this new market and so that in this regard there has been no strategic change in direction following his departure.

“The idea is to take professional grade technology and modify it for use in the crypto space,” says Jedeikin. “We see crypto as a high growth area with growing demand from brokers, asset managers and hedge funds for a mature trading solution. While the volumes in the market are down it may be discouraging for the retail side, but on the institutional side we are seeing strong growth.”

For these institutional players, according to Jedeikin, what’s more important than the volatility of cryptoassets is the technology, workflow and infrastructure around the trading of these assets. And this is where he thinks TradAir can help.

“There is a vast amount of startups in this space, we’re not yet at the point of consolidation, but the advantage that we have is that we’re coming from a very stable banking background, because at the end of the day we’re talking about trading. Today, you see all these different exchanges using web services APIs, institutional firms can’t trade like that, they can’t have a chance that the order will get lost if the connection goes down. So there needs to be professional grade technology and that’s what we see ourselves bringing to the table,” says Jedeikin.