The question arrives in the inbox most weeks: where is your office. The honest answer is that the work happens in a handful of cities and the team moves between them, because the firms we build for are spread across time zones that no single address can cover. A brokerage launching in Dubai and a prop firm scaling in London do not need the same hours from us, and pretending otherwise with one headquarters and one nine-to-five would serve neither.
So this is a plain description of where the team turns up, why those places, and how to get a meeting in each of them. No mystique, no map graphic with pins on twelve continents.
Dubai
More of our conversations start here than anywhere else. The regulatory infrastructure attracts brokerage founders, the free zones make company formation practical for firms with clients across the Gulf, Africa and South Asia, and the whole industry passes through in the expo season. When we are in Dubai the days are usually back to back meetings rather than desk work.
The questions here skew towards licensing and payments: which permission a given business model actually needs, what the local rails will and will not process, and how to structure a group that serves several regions. The regulatory side is set out in the DFSA guide.
Cyprus
Limassol is where the operational people are. Compliance officers, dealing desks, retention teams and the vendors who serve them all sit within a short drive of each other, and a week there produces more detail about how brokerages actually run day to day than a month of calls. If a feature request is going to arrive from anywhere, it arrives from a Limassol ops room.
Conversations here are less about starting a firm and more about fixing one: migrating off a CRM that no longer fits, cutting a manual approval step, tightening reporting before an audit. The regulatory context for most of those firms is in the CySEC guide.
London
London is the institutional end. Liquidity providers, prime brokers, payment institutions and the professional services firms that surround them. Meetings tend to be shorter, more specific and more sceptical, which is useful. If a claim about a system does not survive a London due diligence session, it should not be on a website either.
SINGUARD supplies software. Every firm we work with is responsible for its own licensing, client money handling and compliance, wherever it operates.
Hong Kong and the Asian circuit
The corporate structure sits here, and so does a meaningful part of the client base. Asian trading hours also decide how we schedule support: a platform issue at the Tokyo open is not something a European team should be discovering at breakfast. Time zone coverage is an engineering constraint before it is a customer service one.
The rest of the year is remote, and that is the point
Between trips the work is done from wherever it is being done, and nothing about it depends on a room. The build, the deployments, the support desk and the compliance research all run the same way regardless of city. What the travel adds is the part that does not translate over a call: watching someone use the software badly and realising the interface, not the user, is the problem.
Both of us travel, and the split follows the work. Alex Onta built the eTrader platform and leads it, with Roman Onta helping on the design, so platform and execution meetings tend to follow him. Alex Onta & Roman Onta built the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals together, and they carry the worldwide compliance, payments and corporate structuring work together too, so those meetings can go either way. Background on both is in the profile piece.
How to book time
Tell us the city and the month. If we are already going to be there, we will build the day around it, and if not, a call usually settles the question faster than a flight would. What helps most is knowing in advance whether you want a demo, a licensing conversation or a payments one, because those bring three different people to the table.
Expo weeks are the exception, since the calendar is set months ahead and fills quickly. The way we approach those events is described in the piece on finding us at expos. Outside those weeks, there is no fixed schedule and no gatekeeping. Ask, and we will tell you where the team will be.
"A single headquarters would only mean being in the wrong time zone for most of our clients."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- Dubai conversations are mostly licensing, payment rails and multi-region group structure.
- Limassol is where the operational detail comes from: compliance, dealing desks and retention teams.
- London meetings are shorter, more specific and more sceptical, which is useful for testing claims.
- Hong Kong sets the corporate structure and shapes support coverage for Asian trading hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is SINGUARD based?
The corporate structure sits in Hong Kong, and the team works across Dubai, Limassol and London depending on where clients are. Between trips the build, deployments, support and compliance work run remotely.
Can I meet the team outside expo weeks?
Yes. Name the city and the month. If a trip is already planned the day can be built around it, and if not, a call usually settles the question faster than a flight would.
Who will I be meeting?
It depends on the topic. Platform and execution questions go to Alex Onta, who built eTrader and leads it. Compliance, payments and corporate structuring are handled by Alex Onta and Roman Onta together, as are the CRM products.
About the Author
Alex Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He built eTrader, the terminal, the mobile apps, eTrader Broker, Copytrading, Business and Community, along with the worldwide clustered-server infrastructure it all runs on, with his brother Roman Onta helping on the design, and he leads that division today. Together with Roman he builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals, and the two of them carry worldwide compliance, payment processing and international business structuring side by side. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.