Forbes: The FTMO Cover Story

This article was originally published as a cover story in the Czech edition of Forbes Magazine. With their permission, we want to share this English translation with our global community. It offers an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the journey of our founders, Otakar Šuffner and Marek Vašíček, from the early days of FTMO to the landmark acquisition of global broker OANDA and our vision for the future of the trading industry.

Author: JANA MERTOVÁ, Photo: ANNA KOVAČIČ

They built a billion-dollar company without investors and created an entire new trading industry from scratch. Now, the architects of the fintech rocket FTMO are aiming even higher. With the purchase of global broker OANDA, Otakar Šuffner and Marek Vašíček are playing the big game. In an exclusive interview, they reveal the behind-the-scenes details of this unique acquisition and their future plans.

The year is 2004. Otakar Šuffner is fifteen years old and has just started his first part-time job at McDonald’s in Prague. He works in the kitchen because he likely doesn't look "presentable" enough for the cash register. He spends hours preparing food and unloading deliveries in the warehouse and freezer. He learns diligence. If he’s idle for a moment, he gets the tasks nobody else wants to do. But he doesn’t mind even cleaning tiles with a toothbrush. He knows everyone has to start somewhere and that this experience will push him forward. Where? He has no idea yet.

McDonald’s for the second time. 20 years later. Otakar Šuffner is back here for an early breakfast. This time, as a billionaire, a member of the list of the wealthiest Czechs, and the co-owner and CEO of FTMO. His company laid the foundations for a new industry called "modern prop trading," which opens the doors to financial market trading for significantly more people than was common in the past. He is joined by co-owner and CTO Marek Vašíček. Over their regular Tuesday breakfast, Otakar mentions that the broker OANDA is for sale. They laugh at the idea that they could buy this global firm with a 30-year history. But a few days later, they are writing to New York. How will this turn out? They have no idea yet.

December 2025. McDonald’s for the third time. Vašíček and Šuffner are sipping green tea at the table where they spent every Tuesday morning for many years. The tradition of McDonald’s breakfasts began at a time when, as traders, they had to be at work before six and nowhere else was open at that hour. They would go to the McDonald’s branch on Wenceslas Square along with all the people returning from parties. And they continued doing so long after they had become billionaires. Once, they donated to the Ronald McDonald House, which helps families of children with serious long-term illnesses. When they came for breakfast again the following Tuesday, they had a reservation at their table as a thank you. "Who else can say they are a 'regular' at McDonald’s," Vašíček laughs. 

The FTMO founders have just completed a billion-dollar acquisition of OANDA, which moves their business further ahead by light-years. And ahead of them lies a Forbes cover story interview, which is partly taking place right here, the very spot where the foundations of their fintech rocket were born over breakfasts and where its latest chapter began to be written. And although their Tuesday tradition ended with the renovation of this branch, it remains a place that perfectly illustrates how grounded they stay, even though they are long past being just two guys with a startup, and are now the architects of a global business with millions of clients worldwide.

While still at university, they created a platform that allows people to educate themselves in trading. On it, clients can try out trading via demo accounts that utilize real financial market data but use virtual money. For the best ones, those who pass the so-called FTMO Challenge and, within a limited period, reach a specific profit target while avoiding excessive losses, the company offers the opportunity to trade simulatedly with virtual money but earn real rewards for it. This is possible because FTMO simultaneously uses data from the demo accounts of selected clients for its own real trading. From an idea that no one believed in at the start, they built a unicorn and created a whole new industry from scratch.

Throughout the entire time, they had only one small investor – the father of a friend and a minor entrepreneur from Pardubice, who invested half a million crowns in the project and, after five years, walked away with over 100 million (roughly 5 million USD). This was thanks to an incredibly profitable business model that, in 2024, generated nearly 6.8 billion CZK (roughly 330 million USD) in revenue for FTMO, with an EBITDA profit of 2.4 billion CZK (roughly 117 million USD). A year earlier, Šuffner and Vašíček ranked among the top five entrepreneurs in the Czech Republic in the EY Entrepreneur of the Year competition and took home the award for the best technology entrepreneurs. In the same year, they also appeared for the first time in the ranking of the wealthiest Czechs. Vašíček was the youngest member, and Šuffner was the fifth youngest billionaire, following right after Michal Strnad, Jan Bednář, and Josef Průša. FTMO is also one of the 50 largest taxpayers in the Czech Republic, and its two owners are among the most generous young Czech philanthropists, in 2024 alone, they signed donation agreements totaling 130 million CZK (over 6 million USD). Paradoxically, they attribute their success to the fact that numbers were never their main driver. They were propelled forward by only one best – to have the best product.

With the money they’ve earned over those ten years in business, they could easily retire. Or buy a yacht and a plane. Instead, they bought a new business. As the new year begins, they are, in many respects, standing at the starting line once again. After more than a year of negotiations and approvals, they completed the purchase of the broker OANDA from the investment group CVC last November. Neither side disclosed the transaction price, but according to Forbes estimates, it is close to ten billion crowns. Thanks to this, the Czech group has swelled from 350 to 1,100 people and, in addition to its Prague offices, has gained branches in eight other countries worldwide. A new challenge now stands before Marek Vašíček and Otakar Šuffner – to build a global trading powerhouse.

How does it feel to complete such a large and complex acquisition?

Otakar Šuffner: I was overjoyed when we got the final stamp of approval. It worked out perfectly. We just happened to be holding a conference with OANDA’s management here, so both teams were present for it. We popped a giant bottle of champagne that we had won at a charity auction at the Forbes Gala. And we still have one left. We’re saving that for the next acquisition. (In 2024, the FTMO founders bid one million crowns for a bottle of Moët & Chandon signed by stars of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival to benefit the Jakub Voráček Foundation; a year earlier, they acquired an identical bottle for the same amount to support the Cystic Fibrosis Patients Club, editor’s note.)

Marek Vašíček: The day before, Ota said, "I’ll put the bottle in the fridge, just in case it comes through tomorrow." I was trying to slow him down, saying there was still time and, most importantly, not to jinx it. But the next day, our CFO Radek Dyntar actually came to us and said: "We’ve got it." Acquiring OANDA is an absolutely groundbreaking step for us.

When did you first start considering its purchase?

OŠ: OANDA is a real household name in our business. It is among the largest online trading groups in the world. I found out it was for sale in July 2024. I brought it up to Marek at one of our regular breakfasts. It sounded like a crazy idea, so we mostly just laughed about it. But then I wrote to them anyway. And after the initial informational call, we started considering it for real.

MV: The funny thing is that two years before that, we had a call with CVC and the CEO of OANDA when they were the ones looking at us. We were discussing the possibility of some investment, but in the end, it just fizzled out. And two years later, the roles were reversed. 

It is not every day that a Czech company buys a global player. How unique is this in the world of trading?

MV: Ten years ago, no one understood what we were doing. We had to explain it for years, and many people doubted us. In the meantime, however, the entire industry has transformed. Today, there are conferences specifically focused on modern prop trading, the foundations of which we laid. And the fact that we, as a company from a new, unregulated industry, are buying a traditional regulated broker with a thirty-year history is a beautiful illustration of how far our field has moved. The mere fact that we passed approval from five regulators is proof that we are running a legitimate business and we are doing it damn well.

But you wanted your own broker, a company that facilitates trading on financial markets for individual investors, long before OANDA appeared on the scene.

MV: It made sense to us as the next natural step in our development. Our long-term vision is to build a trading powerhouse – a company that offers services to traders at various levels. And that includes brokerage services. The original plan was to buy small companies with one or two licenses and integrate them into a large broker. But then OANDA appeared as a package of eight licenses together with professional management, global clients, and a thirty-year-old brand. We realized that rather than piecing it together one license at a time, it was better to go big.

How difficult was it to convince CVC that they should take you as serious bidders?

MV: It wasn't easy at all. Even CVC, as the seller, took a risk for an entire year regarding whether the regulators would approve us. They truly had to make sure that "those guys from Prague" had the money and the capabilities to pull it off. To demonstrate that we are a credible firm, we hired renowned companies for every aspect of the deal. We had J.P. Morgan as our investment bankers, EY for various due diligence, and Latham & Watkins as our lawyers. Because we invited only true top-tier players to the table, CVC took us seriously. 

London. Late 2024. An elevator on the fifteenth floor of a skyscraper overlooking the Thames releases an avalanche of suits into a large conference room. Twenty-five people are sitting at the table. OANDA's management, the seller's lawyers, the buyer's lawyers. Everyone has name tags. "And then we walked in wearing sneakers. We felt like we were in the TV show Suits. But we learned so much just by sitting at the same table with these top-tier people," Vašíček recalls of one of the meetings.

The entire process was accompanied by calls almost on a daily basis, often even at three in the morning. "We had lawyers in New York and buy-side advisors in London, while the counterparty had advisors in Singapore. Time zones weren't considered at all. It was expected that everyone would join the calls at any hour of the day or night and be perfectly prepared," Šuffner describes. While CVC has handled countless such deals, for the FTMO founders, it was their first experience of this kind.

"Huge thanks go to the head of our legal department, Eva Svobodová, who, unlike us, had experience with this. And sometimes, she was the only one at the table who had the balls to say that something would be done differently. Our CFO, Radek Dyntar, also did an incredible amount of work," says Šuffner. Both Svobodová and Dyntar have impressive track records prior to FTMO. Svobodová was a partner at White & Case, and Dyntar served as the CFO of Dentons Europe and KKCG, among other roles. The OANDA transaction was put on their desks while they were still in their probationary periods. "They handled it brilliantly. And it was they who immediately reached out to EY and Latham & Watkins to ask if they would advise us. For other pros, it’s probably standard practice, but for us, it was an entirely new world," Vašíček recounts.

How much did you pay the advisors?

OŠ: When you have a lot of people working for you in London or New York, it’s expensive. The advisors alone cost us hundreds of millions of crowns.

You needed approval from five regulators across three continents. How did that whole process go?

OŠ: Brokerage firms usually have only one or two licenses. So, the number of acquisitions and integrations we would have had to perform if we had gone the route of smaller acquisitions would have been an absolute nightmare. With eight licenses, OANDA is like winning the lottery. For three of them, we only had to announce the change of ownership, and for the other five, we had to go through a full approval process. We managed it faster than planned in the end. Originally, we expected that we might not have all the permits until this May.

MV: A funny side note is that the Canadian regulator wanted to know how much we weigh, how tall we are, and our eye and hair color. I’ve gotten used to the compliance team knowing everything about us, but having to tell my female colleagues in the team how much I weigh felt a bit over the line. We owe the fact that we managed all the approvals in the end to our legal and financial departments. We were perfectly prepared for everything. It was an interesting internal exercise. At the same time, it showed that we really aren’t a punk student project anymore, but are capable of doing business on a global level.

How difficult was it to secure financing?

OŠ: When we advanced to the final round, CVC wanted confirmation of financing within eight weeks. Securing financing of that magnitude in such a short time is not exactly easy. Especially for a company with zero credit history. Our only previous credit was a loan for a phone back in 2016. And then, suddenly, we show up saying we need to borrow for a massive acquisition. But we managed to get a syndicate of six Czech banks, led by UniCredit Bank, excited about our story of a Czech company buying a global player. We regularly had calls with the bankers at midnight or over the weekend, and they worked incredibly hard on it with us.

To what extent did your incredible profitability help you with that?

MV: It was absolutely crucial. We had to prove to the banks that lending us the money made sense. It was a good exercise for the two of us because we had to present in front of 40 bankers. Once again, we were in sneakers, which we just can’t help ourselves from wearing, though we did put on blazers. But the bankers liked our story, it made sense, and the numbers added up. It’s another example of how far FTMO has moved. Three years ago, we wouldn’t have even made it to the second meeting.

You have a loan for the first time in your lives. Do you feel any pressure?

OŠ: We do feel some pressure. For the first time, we have to save in certain respects. We have to ask whether we can or cannot do something, whether we will fit within the budget or not. It’s truly a change.

How much has your business grown thanks to the acquisition?

OŠ: OANDA has around 700 employees, which is twice as many as FTMO. In total, there are now about 1,100 of us in the group. On the other hand, OANDA's financial figures are roughly half of ours. In 2024, our revenues were 6.8 billion crowns with an EBITDA profit of 2.4 billion crowns. OANDA had revenues of 175 million dollars and an EBITDA of 50 million dollars. When combined, we are at approximately 11 billion crowns in revenue and an EBITDA of about 3.5 billion crowns.

MV: We have grown incredibly because of it. OANDA is so large that when they hold all-hands meetings, they take place several times a day to accommodate different time zones. In December, we went to introduce ourselves in Poland, and in January, we have a "world tour" ahead of us, visiting all the other branches from London to New York, Toronto, Singapore, and Tokyo. This will mean a lot of traveling for us, including board meetings in New York once a quarter.

Do you plan to keep OANDA’s current management?

OŠ: OANDA is a stand-alone investment, which we liked very much. CVC did a tremendous job there, both in terms of people and technology. So, the management is staying. They have very interesting human capital, they are very capable and likeable people. As for technology, we are well aligned. Both companies are on Google Cloud. We do very similar things and share the same philosophy on how we develop technology. The plan is for OANDA to follow its current roadmap, as will FTMO. Along the way, we will be looking for synergies.

As a fast-growing company in a new industry, you have purchased a traditional, regulated firm. Aren't you worried about the cultural differences?

OŠ: The differences are definitely there. For example, the branch in Japan… There is a completely different culture prevailing there. That is also why we are glad the current management is staying, as we’ve hit it off well with them on a personal level. This will allow us to settle in gradually; we don't have to handle everything overnight. But it's true that we are stepping into a completely new role.

MV: We follow the motto "Two teams, one future." We are consciously saying: "We have two businesses here. We don't have to integrate them in a month and have everyone switch to 'remote-first' like OANDA or 'office-first' like FTMO." But of course, we don't see everything through rose-colored glasses. Although we grew relatively quickly from four people at the start to 350 today, nobody trained us for an acceleration to 1,100. Furthermore, we started as a group of friends and our people have often been doing business with us for ten years, whereas at OANDA, there are professionals brought in by CVC. But we are approaching it responsibly. We know we will have to learn a lot. And we are looking forward to it because it’s going to be incredibly interesting.

FTMO also had a foreign branch in the past. How did that turn out?

MV: At one point, we had a branch in the Philippines. We bet an ice cream that I could set up an office there in five days. Ota said it wasn't possible. But I arrived on Monday, met with local colleagues, and went to the local IKEA. The next day I sorted out the computers and the internet, the third day the lease, the fourth day the cleaning, and on Friday I was sending Ota a selfie from the finished office. We always laugh about it, but he still hasn't bought me that ice cream.

OŠ: I still owe Marek that one. And then Covid hit, so we closed the office there. But we still have colleagues there who work for us remotely. So, FTMO’s only physical office is in Prague, though it boasts an impressive three thousand square meters.

The sun is slowly setting over Prague, and on this December evening, the metropolis is nestled in a pink haze. "We’ve proven that you can build a global business from the Czech Republic, even in industries that aren't exactly traditional here," says Šuffner, as he takes in the 360-degree view of the city from the roof of Quadrio, a city he and Vašíček have firmly put on the global trading map.

A few moments later and several floors down, they are sitting in their office, dominated by a large painting by one of the most prominent young Czech expressionists, Martin Krajc, featuring a bull as a symbol of financial markets. It also features the FTMO logo, which both founders also have tattooed on their bodies.

"The tattoo artist drew the outlines, and four of us from management tattooed each other. It wasn't such a great idea because mine, for example, looks really terrible," Šuffner laughs, showing the creation on his arm. He sits on the left side of the couch, while Vašíček is at the opposite end. They never sit the other way around. They stick to this seating arrangement always and everywhere. "We’re a bit weird about that," they admit. Yet, the success of their fintech rocket is built precisely on their perfect symbiosis.

"Ota spews out a lot of ideas. And I’d rather sleep on them. Ota drives it, I think it through, and that brings us somewhere to the middle. I talk more, Ota less. We complement each other perfectly. Plus, over those ten years, we’ve grown very close," Vašíček describes. When they recently created a strategic outlook for the coming year and each wrote down their vision individually, they agreed completely on 98 percent of things. FTMO would likely never be where it is today if it hadn't been built together by these two guys, who met in 2013 at the University of Economics in Prague thanks to their shared love for trading.

You didn’t originally plan to go into business. You wanted to trade. Why did business eventually win out over trading?

MV: The thing about trading is that it’s incredibly difficult; anything can happen at any time. Even if you do everything perfectly, it can still result in losses tomorrow. Whereas if you don't do business completely poorly and you put energy into it, you should get the results you expect. The probability that progress won't come is significantly lower. At the start, we were just two ordinary guys in college who weren't all that smart and didn't have Ivy League degrees that would get us hired for trading in America or London. So we came up with a model that allows you to trade from the comfort of your own home, even if you’re sitting somewhere like Kačerov.

But no one believed in that idea at first. You were even kicked out of a student competition. What kept you from giving up?

MV: Maybe precisely because of that. When the jury of the xPort Business Accelerator declared after two minutes: "Gentlemen, this is complete nonsense, go home," it actually spurred us on. And we said to ourselves that we’d try to start it on our own. But at the beginning, it really wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. We didn't pay ourselves a salary for five years. Others finished school, started working, went on vacations. And we were locked in a garage-style office in Žižkov sixteen hours a day, going to lunch for the cheapest Chinese food. My mom often told me: "You should just find a job in a bank. In time, you'd be a manager. And you'd finally have a mortgage and a house." For many years, she didn't understand that we were actually doing well and that it was a success. Fortunately, we don't really care what others think. We just follow our own path.

OŠ: We had a huge advantage in that we were building the product for ourselves. And we were convinced that there were plenty of people who would appreciate it too. But we didn't know how to communicate it. It was something new, and it was about trading, which many people had either zero or bad experiences with. We started working on it in 2013, and two years later, we launched our first product under the Czech brand Získejúčet. In hindsight, we should have launched an English website right away, but we didn't launch it until the end of 2017. Until 2018, when there were still only four of us, we didn't grow all that much. Only after that did it start to snowball. We’ve really only had true global success for the last five years.

What was the turning point?

OŠ: FTMO, which is an acronym for the names of the team at the time – Filip, Tomáš, Marek, and Ota, was born in late 2017. We reached more significant figures, where we could afford more employees, by the end of 2018. Reviews and YouTube videos started appearing online. There are relatively few trading websites, so when FTMO appeared on those few pages, word spread quickly. We grew rapidly in 2019 and 2020.

MV: Trading is very solitary, you rarely have a friend you can go to the pub with to talk about trading. But on the other hand, the whole community is very digital, so there are plenty of Discord forums where traders exchange experiences. And when they started writing about FTMO there, it snowballed. At one point, I told the head of marketing to turn off all the ads because we couldn't keep up. He replied that everything had already been turned off for two weeks.

Is it still rolling organically, or do you have to push marketing?

OŠ: Unfortunately, not anymore. At the beginning, we had no competitors. No industry existed. We were the first, so nobody knew what we were doing. Then people started getting interested, and suddenly everyone wanted to do the same thing. I would compare it to Slevomat (a Czech daily deals site). Within a year, 200 voucher companies were formed; soon after, 190 of them left the market. The same thing happened in our industry. Two years ago, dozens of companies similar to FTMO were popping up every month. Most of them went bankrupt because they realized it wasn't that simple. Meanwhile, the market has consolidated into five serious competitors. We are still the leader, but we have to watch what others are doing so they don't overtake us. Consequently, we have to push marketing, for which we have a team of 30 people.

MV: It’s a classic lesson in economics and market dynamics in practice. At first, no one knew or understood us. But then it turned out we brought something enormously profitable to the market. Others took notice. They started copying us, creating competition, and an entire industry was born. But we are glad for the competition because it puts healthy pressure on us.

How exactly does your business model work?

OŠ: It is based on training traders who go through an evaluation process. They receive a wealth of educational videos and apps to help them progress in trading. If they subsequently meet our rules within the so-called FTMO Challenge, they can sign a contract with our trading company. They then receive payouts for trading on simulated accounts. At the same time, FTMO executes real trades, utilizing data from the simulated trades of our selected clients. These clients have demo accounts with up to four million crowns at their disposal. We recently celebrated reaching 500 million dollars paid out to our traders over the course of FTMO's existence. So, we have sent over ten billion crowns out into the world. But otherwise, the vast majority of our income comes from fees for educational courses.

What percentage of people pass your Challenge?

OŠ: Eight to ten percent. Finding the best is truly difficult. In the beginning, we were afraid that if nine out of ten people failed our test, they would be angry. That’s why we built so many educational apps and videos to help clients improve. Even if they don’t succeed in the test, they learn something.

In how many countries do you have traders?

OŠ: In 140 countries. Back when I was still personally sending payments to traders, I used to look up the interesting places where they lived on a map. Sometimes it was small towns in Africa where, according to satellite imagery, there was just desert and a few huts. For instance, one of our traders used the money earned with us to buy solar panels for an entire village that had previously suffered from constant power outages.

For a long time, you topped the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 ranking of the fastest-growing companies in Central and Eastern Europe. In four years, you were able to grow by 40,000 percent. How is your growth looking now?

MV: Year-over-year, we grew by 30 percent. While it’s no longer those thousands and doesn’t sound as cool in articles and competitions, when you consider the scale of the business, 30 percent is great work. We are happy with where it’s heading.

OŠ: There is still huge potential. The OANDA transaction showed us just how big we could be one day. It has helped us see how truly massive the market is.

So what are the pillars of your business now?

MV: The foundation of everything is still our modern prop trading within FTMO. The second pillar is brokerage, provided by OANDA. And the third is traditional proprietary trading, which is the focus of our subsidiary Quantlane. We thus close the entire trading cycle. You can start with a demo account at FTMO to learn what trading entails. Maybe you'll try our challenge. Meanwhile, you can open a trading account with OANDA if you want to trade your own capital. And the most active ones, who want to do it for a living, can end up at Quantlane, where ten traders sit and do nothing else but trade.

OŠ: They have teams of analysts and programmers at their disposal. And they trade with much larger volumes of money than is common. That’s the highest level of the whole cycle. Plus, we have other complementary companies like the marketing agency eVisions. Last fall, we also invested a million dollars in the American cryptocurrency unicorn Zerohash, where we hold a minority stake.

Reports have started circulating that Mastercard wants to buy it at triple the valuation.

OŠ: If that were true, it would be a beautiful return on investment for us in a very short time. But the CEO of Zerohash wrote to us to keep cool, that some negotiations are underway, but realistically nothing is happening yet.

In Horní Malá Úpa, the high season is in full swing. The highest-situated village in the Krkonoše Mountains on the border with Poland is experiencing a surge of downhill and cross-country skiers. As you arrive at the upper parking lot, a white FTMO sign shines in front of you. Vašíček and Šuffner bought a company chalet here, where any employee can go for free with their family.

"I used to go to my mother-in-law's company chalet in Pec, and it was great. So I told Ota, alias our president of real estate investments, that if we ever found a vacant chalet in the Krkonoše, I’d like to buy it. When he heard 'building,' he was thrilled, so we got it during COVID," Vašíček recounts. At first, he was afraid it might be a waste of money. But currently, the booking calendar is completely full, and the chalet with four bowling lanes is the most popular perk among employees.

The FTMO founders have already poured 1.2 billion crowns (nearly 60 million USD) into the real estate branch. Last year, however, they temporarily halted real estate investments due to the OANDA acquisition. But they have a smaller project running in Strašnice, where they are building their first apartment building with fourteen flats. And they completed the renovation of a tenement building in Vinohrady. "It was an ugly, empty building where we now have sixteen apartments for rent. We notice dozens of apartment blocks around Prague where the lights are out. Foreigners often own them as investments. They don't take care of the buildings; they just sell them for profit. And we are the ones buying them. It gives us joy to repair them and return them to the market," says Šuffner.

Even though you are billionaires, you remain very grounded. Why is that?

OŠ: Maybe it’s our upbringing. Perhaps it would be different if the money had come all at once. But because we went through that whole long process, where we didn't even pay ourselves a salary for five years, and only after that did the numbers accelerate, it wasn't such a shock.

MV: I have a great story to go with that. I’m featured in an Economics textbook for high schools, where I have a photo and a profile as the youngest Czech billionaire. My colleague Dan sent it to me. I thought he was playing around with AI, but it turned out his nephew brought it home from school. But back to the question: we never did this with the goal of doing business and making money. We did something we enjoy. And we are still doing it. I don't feel the need to prove anything to anyone. I don't wear branded clothes, nor do I go to social circles where people wouldn't talk to me because I don't have a Patek Philippe watch. I have friends from the time before we were successful. And with them, I discuss normal human problems, not the fact that I need to buy a new private jet because the old one flies too slowly.

So is there anything you actually do spend money on?

OŠ: I spend money on vacations, for example. I often take the extended family, my parents and my wife’s parents. When you head to a nice place and want to spend time there comfortably with a large group of people, it’s an expense that probably not everyone can afford. And it’s great.

MV: I’m the same way.

How do you feed your ego if not with numbers? What are you proud of?

MV: It’s not so much about whether we have a thousand employees or billions in the bank. Rather, I enjoy how we are evolving and how the service keeps getting better for our users. That’s a bigger driver than buying a plane. Some people take the easy road in business, like discounting their product more than we do. Instead, we say to each other over breakfast that we’re going to buy OANDA. That’s a completely different approach to entrepreneurship. We think long-term and take difficult, major steps because we believe they will make sense in the future. We offer the user more than just a Black Friday discount. And it’s just really cool that some guys from Prague earned enough money that instead of a yacht, they bought a global business.

OŠ: I enjoy the fact that every year is different. In recent months, we’ve been dealing with management incentives for two completely different companies, which was very interesting. Securing the financing for the OANDA purchase was a big success, and it will be another big success to pay it off and repay the trust we were given. At the same time, I find joy in philanthropy and helping others. Being able to buy an innovative piece of equipment for a hospital is just incredible.

It’s an early Friday morning, the temperature is near freezing, and the giant head of Franz Kafka peeks out from the cold mist. Around the statue in front of Quadrio, a crowd in Santa hats is gathering, soon to set off running through the streets of Prague. Their motivation is clear: to raise as much money as possible for charitable projects as part of the Ježíšek Run, which FTMO organizes for its employees, friends, and business partners.

For every participant, the company donates ten thousand crowns. Consequently, the nearly two-hundred-strong crowd raises almost two million crowns for charity. In 2024 alone, the company signed donation agreements totaling 130 million crowns. "A large portion is headed to Motol Hospital, where what happened, happened. Our project slowed down as a result, but we aren't backing away from it. Once we can start building, we will construct two unique operating rooms," Šuffner hints, adding that he cannot reveal more details yet.

Marek likes running even outside of charity events. How else do you recharge?

MV: It’s true that I go running so I don't go crazy. And Ota works out, which is why he’s in such good shape. But it starts with the fact that the work itself doesn't drain us. Perhaps what helps is that we live normal lives with our families. We aren't exactly party kings. We manage a reasonable balance.

OŠ: Given that our lives are hectic and we often don't get much sleep, I try to take care of myself. I eat healthily, and exercise has always been a part of my life. But I don't overdo anything.

You still seem incredibly calm at the same time. Does that come from trading?

OŠ: Definitely. We handle risk and stress very well.

MV: That’s our superpower. But trading gave us much more. By starting at 5:30 AM, we learned discipline. And that led to our work ethic. We’ve always done business honestly, making sure we don’t owe anyone anything. We were never punks who didn't look where they were going.

With the money you’ve made, you could easily retire and live a comfortable life. Doesn’t that tempt you?

MV: We are in our thirties, we’re in our productive years. We have the drive and we enjoy building this. I wouldn’t know what to spend the money on or what else to devote myself to. I can't imagine using those resources with any greater utility than what my work gives me. And the business needs to be built even higher.

Specifically, how do you want to push it forward? What is still missing from the puzzle?

OŠ: There’s plenty. It’s more a question of: what do we actually have? We process a relatively large volume of payments, so a payment institution, for example, would make sense. But other brokers in regions where we aren’t present yet would also fit into our holding.

MV: At our scale, it makes sense to continue expanding our business through acquisitions. It’s inevitable because we can’t play a small game anymore.

Do you have a ceiling for how far this can grow?

MV: We don’t think like that. We mainly want to do great things. And when Ota comes up with an idea that he wants to buy a broker in the Middle East, I’ll think about it again. I’ll tell him to calm down. And then, maybe, we’ll actually buy it. We don't deal in "what ifs." We operate very much day-to-day. But at the same time, we have a clear vision carved in stone: to create a trading powerhouse, continue to acquire, and grow.

Read the original article by FORBES CZ here.