Alexey Kirienko, EXANTE Founder
Alexey Kirienko is one of the co-founders of the global brokerage EXANTE, and has played a pivotal role in shaping the company’s success. EXANTE is a global broker specialising in servicing professional clients, with a strong emphasis on digitisation, client service and providing innovative trading opportunities. EXANTE has experienced continuous growth since its establishment in Malta in 2011 when Alexey Kirienko, Anatoly Knyazev, and Gatis Eglitis decided to create a platform targeted on the needs of professional derivatives traders. Kirienko’s extensive knowledge and insights into the needs of traders, gained from his academic and professional experience dealing in futures markets, have been invaluable for guiding EXANTE’s operations. A full corporate biography of Kirienko may be found on Bloomberg: Alexey Kirienko Bloomberg.
Kirienko distinguished himself from an early age by his interest in mathematics, particularly within the realm of financial markets. His interest in trading problems grew and developed during his university studies, where he applied sophisticated techniques to problems of pricing. Initially drawn to the oil and gas sector, he leveraged his expertise to develop arbitrage trading strategies that capitalised on inefficiencies in futures prices relative to their underlying assets. Kirienko’s academic journey led him to pursue a master’s degree in economics, where he further honed his skills in machine learning and advanced statistical techniques such as neural networks and correlation analysis. Throughout the 2000s, he continued to refine his complex derivatives trading strategies, which would later prove instrumental in the formation of EXANTE. During this period, Kirienko crossed paths with Anatoly Knyazev, another like-minded individual passionate about applied mathematics and its implications for quantitative trading strategies.
The two found they had much in common, and soon began to plan a route to market for their ideas of a digitised financial future. Their shared vision for a next-generation brokerage, tailored to the needs of derivatives traders, laid the foundation for EXANTE. Joined by Gatis Eglitis, a commercial specialist with a wealth of experience in business development and financial product launches, Kirienko and Knyazev set out to address the challenges they had encountered throughout their trading careers. The end result was a platform conceived with a clear objective: to provide an exceptional trading experience for professional clients. All of the founders shared a belief in both digitalisation and internationalisation in financial markets, pushing EXANTE to develop as comprehensive a global footprint as possible.
Initially operating from Malta, EXANTE expanded its presence to Cyprus, Hong Kong, and London. Company staff are spread across these locations today, allowing round-the-clock customer service to serve clients across East Asia, the Americas, and beyond. By registering licenses from major regulators such as the FCA (UK), SFC (Hong Kong), and CySec (Cyprus), EXANTE demonstrated its commitment to adhering to the highest standards of financial regulation, client money segregation, and privacy. Compliance with international frameworks like MiFID II further underscores the company’s dedication to safeguarding the interests of its professional clients. Meeting the stringent requirements offers significant protections to EXANTE clients, both in terms of client money segregation, bankruptcy protection, and fair market practices. This focus on regulatory compliance is combined with a strong commitment to client privacy, with EXANTE only collecting and using the most essential client data to protect clients.
Kirienko’s role within EXANTE focuses on identifying new products or platform changes to better service traders. His expertise in developing trading strategies and identifying valuable products ensures that the brokerage remains responsive to the evolving needs of its client base, which has grown dramatically over the last decade. As EXANTE’s client assets in accounts now stand at over $2 billion, the company has become a trusted execution services provider for a diverse range of professional investment management clients. EXANTE maintains a focus on facilitating international trading on a single platform which allows clients to access more than 600,000 global instruments through a centralized, user-friendly account. The multi-currency account feature eliminates the need for clients to open and fund multiple trading accounts for different securities, streamlining their trading experience.
Outside of EXANTE, Kirienko is an established thought leader within the industry, regularly speaking at financial events about his experience running EXANTE and as a trader. He also acts as an early-stage angel investor, investing in promising start-up companies across various industries with a focus on computing hardware and the tech industry more generally. Kirienko is one of the handful of figures who have done the most to shape the fortunes of EXANTE today. His understanding of conditional probabilities, statistics, and game theory, shaped by an academic and research background and trading history, shapes the client experience for EXANTE customers. As clients increasingly engage with EXANTE across a growing range of global instruments, Kirienko’s expertise ensures that they benefit from a robust platform that meets the needs of real traders. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
