Founded In 2014 by Gavin Smith and Marcie Terman who between them hold over 35 years of experience in financial services, First Global Credit were the first company to allow Bitcoin to be used as collateral margin for over 200 stocks and a selection of ETF’s. Within 14 months they’ve grown their user base to over 1300 clients, processing close to $2milion of trades a month.
This week, First Global Credit announced that they’ve expanded their offering to include stocks traded on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) meaning that customers are now able to buy stocks for companies such as BT,Vodafone & BskyB.
Communications Director Marcie Terman acknowledged that need for choice, commenting
“We already offer a good mix of tech, entertainment, Internet and health care stocks and while we offer several ETFs which cover geographic growth areas like Brazil, Russia, China and Mexico, until now choices were limited to the American markets. First Global supports customers from all continents (except Antarctica) and it is our plan to offer equity trading from a wide range of countries starting with the United Kingdom, where we have a concentration of clients.”
The company’s goal is to provide services that generate a return from bitcoin without clients having to sell them, something which Terman see’s as a “distinct edge” for their clients, over other holders. Currently, the company offer several services to achieve their objective, offering TRS (Total return swap) derivatives where customers are able to use bitcoin as collateral to secure long or short positions with profits/losses settled in bitcoin. Additional services include “Currency Switch” which allows the collateral to be converted to fiat without the need to close trades.