Interactive Brokers enters Taiwan through a new partnership

Interactive Brokers Group just became the first international broker to support Sinopac Securities — a trading company based in Taiwan. Sinopac offers its services to institutional and retail clients alike, and allows them to trade a variety of assets from the US market, such as stocks, ETFs, and fixed-income products. Due to the IBKR instrument line, it managed to expand to 90 worldwide stock markets.

Yesterday, February 16th, a press release explained that the new partnership will expand the global client base of Interactive Brokers to include traders from Taiwan. More than that, it will also strengthen its presence in the APAC region.

Interactive Brokers enters Taiwan

At the moment, IBKR offers its services to users in over 200 countries around the world. As for Interactive Brokers, it will now allow investors from Taiwan to access a variety of major trading platforms, multiple tools, and other advanced technology that will be able to help them reach their financial goals. Furthermore, the trading firm also offers more than 100 different order types, one of which is algorithmic trading.

Despite it being advanced and quite popular among investors and traders, it was not available to Taiwan’s financial markets participants through other brokers. The company’s CEO, Milan Galik, said that the firm is quite pleased to work with Sinopac and bring Interactive Brokers’ global trading capabilities and expertise to Taiwan. Right now, the company is looking forward to serving the needs of the local market and its investors.

One more thing worth mentioning is that Sinopac’s collaboration will also allow Interactive Brokers to offer Taiwanese stocks from Taiwan Stock Exchange to its existing user base in other parts of the world.

Interactive Brokers also brought its crypto offering to Hong Kong

Interactive Brokers’ expansion into Taiwan is not the only important development for the company this week. Only two days earlier, the company managed to expand its offering into Hong Kong, which is also in the same APAC region.

The company now offers access to cryptocurrencies in HK, in addition to launching crypto trading services in the region. For the moment, that only includes Bitcoin and Ethereum, as these are the only crypto assets that it can offer in this part of the world due to the active regulations. However, it will allow institutional clients to trade.

One thing to note is that HK investors who wish to trade digital assets will need to have HKD 8 million in investable assets. As for institutions, they will be required to have over HKD 40 millin in assets.

Interactive Brokers has been offering crypto trading for about a year and a half now, after launching them in September 2021 in the US, in partnership with Paxos.