Gold Magazine March - April 2013, Issue 24 | Seite 66

BINARY TRADING

CEO
THE RELUCTANT

BANC DE BINARY, THE WORLD’S FASTEST-GROWING ONLINE BINARY OPTIONS TRADING
BROKERAGE, RECENTLY LAUNCHED IN CYPRUS WITH A BRAND-NEW OFFICE IN LIMASSOL.
THE CYPRUS OFFICE WILL SERVE AS THE COMPANY’S EUROPEAN AND MIDDLE-EASTERN
HEADQUARTERS AND REPRESENTS A MULTI-MILLION EURO INVESTMENT IN THE ISLAND.
BANC DE BINARY FOUNDER AND CEO OREN LAURENT SPOKE TO GOLD ABOUT HOW HE
STARTED THE COMPANY, HIS PLANS FOR CYPRUS, HIS OPTIMISTIC VIEW OF THE ISLAND’S
FUTURE AND WHY HE DOESN’T HAVE HIS OWN DESK IN ANY OF HIS COMPANY OFFICES.
By John Vickers. Photograph by Jo Michaelides

H

ow many company offices do
you walk into
and right there,
in front of you, is
the CEO sitting
at his desk? That’s
what might well happen to you when you
go to meet Oren Laurent, founder and CEO
of Banc De Binary, though he will doubtless
point out that the office isn’t his. Laurent, a
bright, funny, charming, hyperactive American doesn’t actually have an office of his
own in the Limassol building that houses his
company’s European headquarters, nor does
he have one at any of Banc De Binary’s other
addresses (including one on Wall Street,
where he started his career as a retail trader).
“I don’t really believe in myself as a proper
CEO,” he says with remarkable candour.
“I’m very eccentric, I walk around, I yell, I
shout, I move my hands, I’m n ot interested
in sitting alone on the top floor. I don’t need
an office because I have to be out and about,
moving all the time. I’m not able to sit in an
office”.
So when he needs to be at the computer,
it’s a matter of finding the nearest one that
no-one else is using. Laurent, 28, is acutely

aware of his own talents and limitations: “I
have my creativity, which drives me forward
and will drive the company forward but in
the end, a company needs management and
I learnt very quickly to make sure that I have
very good people around me, people who are
much more intelligent than I am. If I had to
manage the 230 people who are currently
employed in our four offices, I would drive
everybody crazy and they would receive their
salaries either two months in advance or two
months late because the organisation simply
wouldn’t exist!”
For someone whose personnel numbers have
soared from four to 230 in the space of 30
months, Oren Laurent is remarkably modest, almost blasé, about his achievements.
But over the past decade he has seen much
more – and made more money – than most.
“I started off as a retail trader as everybody
on Wall Street does,“he recalls. “Back then,
in 2004-2005, Wall Street was booming and people like me would graduate in
economics and go to work in some small,
unknown firm and suddenly we were taking
home huge cheques and being paid amazing
commissions. You know how young guys
are – buying new cars, leading a flamboyant
lifestyle, etc., in New York – and it was all

about that. I had originally been thinking
along the lines of ‘I just want to go and get
a good stable job with a big company like
Lehman Brothers!’ and the sales side wasn’t
that appealing to me at first but when I saw
how much my friends were making I decided to give it a try. I became a retail broker,
meaning that I was essentially pitching stock
to clients. I did that for about two years and
made a lot of money. It was just so easy! We
were young and reckless and we didn’t think
what could happen later on”.
Laurent was later approached by some hedge
funds which were the latest trend (“Suddenly
everybody wanted the exotic adventure of
a hedge fund”) and he admits that while he
had made money as a trader, he was now
making “serious money”. “That was the time
of my life!” he remembers. “Ten of us were
put into a room by a hedge fund supported
by Credit Suisse and we were told, ‘You
guys have a week to come up with a new
concept’. I was the youngest in the room by
at least 10 years and all of a sudden I had
an idea and I said, ‘Right now, everybody
is defaulting on their life insurance policies because they believe that they can take
that money and put it into the market and
make more money. Why don’t we buy that

66 Gold THE INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT, FINANCE & PROFESSIONAL SERVICES MAGAZINE OF CYPRUS

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07/03/2013 11:47