neumob -how to improve foreign exchange mobile app performance

App acceleration for a mobile-first world

Introduction: The Costs and Causes of Poor Mobile App Performance

The foreign exchange market, or FX, is the mostly widely traded market in the world. As a virtual marketplace, FX doesn’t face any physical restrictions, allowing people and institutions worldwide to trade 24 hours per day. This has made the FX market extremely popular. In fact, The Bank for International Settlements puts daily FX trade value over $5.3 trillion. That’s more than 50 percent larger than the entire annual output of the UK, according to the World Bank.

Traders worldwide are always active in the FX market, creating an agile marketplace that responds almost instantaneously to global events and country-specific conditions. As conditions change, FX traders seek to make profits from exchange rate fluctuations.

To take advantage of exchange rate moves, FX traders need to react quickly with whichever trading tools they use to place their trade orders. As such, they demand consistently high performance from their tools, regardless of location, network conditions or trading tool functionality. That’s why FX trading platforms look to speed as a distinct competitive differentiator to attract and retain customers. For example, OANDA puts performance data front-and-center on their fxTrade™ platform homepage.

Speeding Foreign Exchange (FX) Mobile Trading Apps A Neumob White Paper

FIGURE 1. OANDA Stresses the Importance of Speed


Whitepaper: Speeding FX Trading Mobile Apps

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OANDA claims the fxTrade platform executes 98% of trades within 0.069 seconds or less. That’s great performance for an online platform. However, such claims cannot yet be made specifically for FX trading mobile apps. With apps, despite their enormous and growing popularity, inconsistent performance continues to be rampant. This is evidenced, for instance, by a couple recent reviews posted for OANDA fxTrade’s iOS and Android mobile apps.

A quick search of FX trading mobile apps in the App Store and on Google Play yields a vast number of similar complaints about app speed and performance for many of the top apps. In the minds of FX traders, the words ‘slow’, ‘lag’, and ‘hangs’ translate into “I risk losing lots of money.” As such, it isn’t hard to imagine the most common reactions by FX traders to a slow mobile app experience. A recent survey from Dimensional Research reveals that the majority of users take one of three actions when faced with a slow mobile app, all of which are bad for the app creator. Users uninstall the app, stop using it or switch to a competitor’s app.

Poor mobile app performance could cost an FX trading platform millions in lost revenues. Once an app gets stuck with a reputation for being slow, the brand could be damaged for years. That’s because many FX

FIGURE 2. Traders Want Faster FX Apps

FIGURE 3. The Correlation Between Mobile App Speed and Abandonment



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traders have already glimpsed the future and are adjusting to it now. A 2015 study by E*TRADE found that 81 percent of investors under age 44 categorized the ability to invest on the go as “critical”. Moreover, 55 percent of active investors (your most valuable users) already want wearables, such as the Apple Watch, to do their investing.

This desire for on-the-go capabilities and tools means that FX trading apps must perform fast anywhere their users go, whether in zones of super-fast connectivity or zones of spotty mobile coverage. Apps that cannot provide high performance, availability and trading convenience under all conditions will be left behind by the majority of traders.

Hurdles to High Performance in FX Mobile Apps

The traditional PC-focused Internet (PC Internet) and TCP/IP protocol were never designed to support the fast delivery of mobile apps. As Figure 5 below demonstrates, geography-induced latency causes a minimum communications delay of 70-300 milliseconds, depending on the distance between end users and a trading app’s origin server. TCP/

FIGURE 4: FX Trading Apps Must be Fast Everywhere

FIGURE 5: Latency Caused by the Traditional PC Internet



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IP further slows app delivery by adding unnecessary communications overhead to each transmission. The protocol requires multiple handshakes between end-user devices and an app’s origin server in order to deliver a single object.

The biggest hurdle to FX app performance occurs over the ‘Mobile Last Mile’, where FX traders exist and move. The last mile extends from the Internet’s edge, to the cell tower and down to mobile traders’ devices.

This is where 70-90 percent of FX mobile app delivery latency takes place, which explains why FX traders face delays even when they are located in the same city as an app’s point of origin.

Delays have always seemed inevitable for FX mobile apps, because they are constantly making 3rd party calls for data between end-user devices, the app’s origin and multiple data providers. All of these communications must traverse the mobile last mile. The end result has traditionally been that app creators have had to make compromising choices about their apps. Either they reduce functionality in order to speed performance or load up on functionality and accept slower performance.

Unfortunately, FX traders don’t accept the tradeoffs that app developers struggle with constantly. Traders want full functionality and super high

FIGURE 6: The Impact of the Mobile Last Mile

FIGURE 7: More Features Equal More Risks to Performance

Options like the ones shown here are features that increase 3rd-party calls and data use, and slow down FX apps.

Live updates and graphic rendering, as well as action options will also eat up mobile bandwidth and slow your app.



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performance simultaneously. These types of FX trading app reviews, calling for more and more functional enhancements, show the state of app consumer demand today:

Such demands are common and can be found in any FX app’s reviews. It seems unrealistic to expect FX mobile apps to continue piling more functions together. Yet, ignoring user demands when competing apps are just a couple clicks away would be perilous to any app creator.

How to Speed Your FX App and Add Functionality

Neumob has built the world’s first end-to-end accelerator designed to speed FX trading mobile apps. Delivered as a two-line SDK, the Neumob Mobile App Accelerator (Accelerator) provides an FX app with instant access to acceleration features at all stages of the mobile delivery process—the first mile, middle mile and last mile.

By eliminating latency in each mobile delivery stage, the Accelerator speeds FX apps by a factor of 2x-10x, whether an app and its users are located within the same city or on different continents. The Accelerator delivers consistent speed, because we purpose-built it as a Mobile First product. We recognized that optimal mobile app acceleration requires three major elements:

1. Resource offload in the first mile

2. Middle mile acceleration across the Internet

3. WAN-like acceleration over the Mobile Last Mile to end-user devices

FIGURE 8: Traders Continue to Push for More Features and Functions



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Providing optimizations around each element, the Neumob Accelerator achieves the fastest possible download speeds for any given FX app. Figure 9 below shows a detailed breakdown of the acceleration features we designed into the Neumob Accelerator at each stage of the mobile app delivery process.

Beyond the features listed in Figure 9, it’s important to note how Neumob uniquely circumvents latencies induced by the PC Internet, Cloud and TCP/IP. Neumob has built the only truly global middle mile network of PoP servers to accelerate the Internet-to-Mobile last mile handoff. We manage PoPs (points of presence) in 40 cities on 6 continents. At the same time, our high-performance protocol is designed to address high-latency networks and the request/response nature of mobile-based applications while maintaining all the beneficial features of standard transfer protocols. By increasing the TCP throughput and maintaining a pool of open connections, the Accelerator significantly reduces the number of round-trips between the end user, application servers and 3rd party data sources. This accelerates mobile app response times to provide a LAN-like experience.

By speeding owned and third-party calls, the Accelerator enables FX app creators to incorporate more real-time data feeds than ever thought possible, without hindering app performance.

FIGURE 9: Accelerating the Entire Mobile App Delivery Process

- Traffic offload- Connection offload- Persistent connections

- Neumob Cloud Routing Protocol- Neumob cloud Communication Protocol- Neumob Cloud Compression- Neumob Cloud Dynamic Acceleration- Neumob Cloud Static Caching- Neumob Cloud Encryption- Neumob Access Control

- Neumob 3-POP WAN Acceleration to device- Neumob Mobile Protocol (not TcP/IP)- Neumob Software-Defined Content Routing- Neumob Mobile Encryption- Neumob Mobile Compression- Neumob Mobile Dynamic Acceleration (ex: Rest API calls and 3rd-party calls)- Neumob Mobile Static Caching (ex: images, video)



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Getting Started with Mobile App Acceleration is Easy

Neumob makes the task of accelerating mobile apps extremely simple. A developer needs only download the Neumob SDK, install the SDK’s two lines of code onto an app, and release the app update.

Once the update is released, anyone with access can open the Neumob control panel, select the relevant domains and/or URLs to accelerate, and the FX app begins to accelerate in real time.

Conclusion

FX Traders have much higher demands for features and performance than do users of most other apps. For traders, speed is money, and they will not continue to risk their money on FX mobile apps that offer anything less than optimal performance. This compels FX app creators to strive for speeds that equal those of the traditional PC Internet.

The lack of a mobile-first infrastructure has hampered efforts by CDN and cloud service providers to accelerate mobile apps over the Mobile Last Mile to user devices. As a result, FX traders lose their much desired freedom to trade ‘on the go’ at any time they choose.

Neumob’s Mobile App Accelerator enables FX mobile app creators to overcome the business damage caused by poor app performance on end-user devices. We purpose-built our Accelerator as a Mobile First solution so that businesses can deliver the fastest experiences possible and gain loyal app users. Since we have solved the issues that lead to Mobile Last Mile delays, we can accelerate the performance of any Mobile App, whether its users are located across the world or down the street.

For a free trial of Neumob, sign up on the Neumob portal at http://portal.neumob.com.

FIGURE 10: Getting Started is Easy

neumob -how to improve foreign exchange mobile app performance

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