From client to employee: he used to expose smugglers at the airport; today Pavel Dušek heads key parts of Prague’s FTMO

• Since childhood, Pavel Dušek has been drawn to the world of aviation; eventually, he pursued it professionally for over ten years.
• Somewhat surprisingly, this field later led him to trading, which he first pursued more out of curiosity, but then an unexpected opportunity came along.
• Today he heads the largest part of the Prague prop trading company FTMO as the COO.

Pavel Dušek has always been fascinated by aeroplanes, so from an early age he knew that he wanted to do something where he would be close to them. “Later, I discovered a high school that was focused on exactly this, and immediately after graduating, I went to work at the airport in Prague,” says Dušek.

He’s now the COO of FTMO, where he is in charge of a team of 130 people and manages a platform on which over 3.5 million people learn to trade and which, under his leadership, has grown to the entire world. But it was a long journey to get here.

After high school, he started working for Czech Airlines and gradually worked his way up to a position that involved detecting counterfeit passengers’ documents. He ended up staying in Prague for three years. “Then, by coincidence, the same job position opened up in Dubai for Emirates, which was experiencing a boom at the time. I thought: “I’m young, I have nothing to lose, so I applied and after about a year, in 2008, they called me to see if I was still interested. I almost forgot applying there, but I went for it, and they took me,”

Ministerial award

He ended up spending over eight years in Dubai. While working there, he finished his university studies and continued to do what he did best: detecting forgery in documents. 

“It’s not easy at all, you have to really train your eyes,” says Dušek. Detecting fraud is very important for airlines. “It protects them from fines that they would receive from the immigration authorities in the arrival country of a passenger with false documents. Repatriating these passengers is expensive and, of course, a big security risk,” he explains.

If someone is fascinated by aviation, the question logically arises as to whether the person in question aspired to be a pilot. “I’ve always been attracted to it, I used to fly on a simulator at home, but I knew that I would never get there due to health requirements. I had severe myopia, which was later solved by laser surgery. At the same time, it was also expensive – the pilot course cost around three million Czech crowns ($130.000), which I didn’t have,” he says. He abandoned the idea, but not completely: “Maybe one day, when the time comes, I’ll get a private flying license.”

Even though his dream of becoming a pilot didn’t come true, he wasn’t bored with his job. He also experienced situations that he can’t easily forget. One of them was especially memorable. “We participated in breaking up an organised ring that was smuggling Kuwaiti Bedouins. These are people who live as nomads and often don’t even have documents. When they want to get to another country, they use organised groups that offer them these opportunities and sell them for a lot of money. They often sell all their property with the promise that they will have a good time in another country,” he explains.

As part of a longer observation, Dušek, together with other specialists, managed to identify the entire group. “We later received an Award with a reception from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates for it,” Dušek adds about the unconventional experience.

Leftover money

After more than eight years, however, he was no longer interested in life in the Middle East. “Being in Dubai for so long is challenging. When I lived there, I was between twenty and thirty years old, but I thought I could start living normally in my country, and I also felt that I was starting to miss the Czech lifestyle, says Dušek.

“There’s not much to do in Dubai; you just go there to make money. I found some hobbies there; I bought an off-road car and drove in the desert, which is a popular local adrenaline sport, but you get used to that very quickly,” he says.

Working for an airline gave him another big advantage: access to employee flight tickets, which are cheaper than standard ones. “I travelled a lot, but after all those years, even that was starting to be enough for me,” says Dušek. It was during his frequent flying that the door to a new chapter of work also opened for him. 

“By always being all over the world, I brought back some local currency from each country that I hadn’t spent. I figured out how to exchange it back for the best: I always looked at the exchange rates and decided where to go to exchange it, which was very inefficient. So I started looking to see if it could be done online; and online money exchange is factually a trading,” he says of his early days as a trader.

He opened his first brokerage account and began experimenting and becoming more interested in the industry. “It was towards the end of my life in Dubai that I was already thinking about returning,” Dušek says.

From client to employee

Once he got back, he started trading on Získejúčet.cz, today’s FTMO, owned by Marek Vašíček and Otakar Šuffner. At the time, it was oriented purely on the Czech and Slovak markets.

“Then suddenly I got an email saying they were looking for a new member to join the team.” says Dušek “I was on my way to Prague, so I applied. I came for an interview, and we basically hit it off right away as there was a noticeable sympathy both ways” he says.

After he joined in 2018, the idea of changing Získejúčet.cz to FTMO came up as a way to expand the regional platform worldwide. “That was my main responsibility,” says Dušek. 

Today, the company has over 3.5 million clients in more than 140 countries worldwide. The largest numbers are in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, but also in the United States and Vietnam. Internationally, its users number in the hundreds of thousands, while it maintains several tens of thousands of Czech clients.

FTMO and prop trading

FTMO offers traders a service known as modern prop trading. This model allows customers, after paying a fee and passing a verification process that tests their trading skills, to trade on a simulated account that mirrors real market movements. 

The company thus obtains information from clients, which it can use to trade with its own capital. The company then pays clients rewards based on their results. The best traders manage to make a living from prop trading. Beginner traders can try simulated trading for free.

Dušek’s first position was as manager of the English website. “Back then, the guys couldn’t properly define what I should do. I was the fifth to join the company, and at first everyone did everything. I started building support for clients, and one of my next roles was to establish partnerships so that the world would learn about us. We also focused on localisation, hiring people in individual countries who knew the language and were also traders. That was a crucial factor at the beginning that helped us do business worldwide,” he recalls of his early days at the company.

Since the end of 2021, Dušek has been the Chief Operating Officer at FTMO. Today, he is responsible for the largest part of the company, including around 130 people out of a total of around 350. His field of responsibility is Operations, which mainly includes everything related to dealings with clients – customer support, client onboarding, investigations, chargebacks, quality control, and payout processing.

Trading powerhouse

However, the current number one topic is clear for  FTMO: OANDA, a global brokerage platform for trading in all possible asset classes. The acquisition was completed last December. “We are thinking about how to use the workforce and expertise between the two companies,” explains Dušek. OANDA and FTMO will remain two separate brands, but under one roof.

The long-term goal is then to build what FTMO calls a trading powerhouse, a place where you can trade in financial markets in all possible ways. “One of its main pillars is the brokerage firm, and in this respect OANDA fits perfectly into our vision,” says Dušek. 

It also includes prop trading and all the tools that make trading easier for clients, such as risk calculators, a mentoring application, statistical market predictions, educational content including a comprehensive academy, psychological courses, and indicators for trading platforms or mobile applications.

Over the past six months, FTMO has conducted an exercise in which people from Prague visited the European headquarters of the newly acquired company, located in Krakow, to exchange know-how. “Thanks to this, we now have a plan for how to proceed. OANDA is, for example, very strong in terms of regulation. It has eight licenses in financial markets around the world; it knows how to operate in this direction,” says Dušek. 

FTMO, on the other hand, is rather the opposite, according to him. The company grew up as a garage startup that is efficient and fast. “Which is a bit contradictory for a company that has limitations in terms of regulations. We want to find some balance here,” he adds.

At the same time, the first changes have already taken place in terms of defining the business of both companies. The OANDA Prop Trader platform, which was a direct competitor of FTMO, was incorporated under the Prague-based company. “It made strategic sense. Their main geographic scope was in Southeast Asia, while we want to do global business, so it made sense to merge the platforms. We managed to convince about 60 percent of their clients to switch to FTMO, which I consider a success,” says Dušek.

The benefits of the acquisition should soon be felt by the clients of both companies. “It is planned, but it is a business secret for now. However, I believe that it will be very positive. We have two huge companies here, and we want to build on that by coming up with something that will support clients who trade with their own money to be on the FTMO platform.” Dušek adds that there are also ideas for new products that would blend both businesses, which he believes is essential.

Of course, this gives rise to the question when will that trading powerhouse be completed: “It is developing, but we are not yet at the stage where we would say that we are a powerhouse.” says Dušek. “When we can connect all the worlds, we will be one. If I had to imagine a time horizon, it would be a horizon of a year or two, but that is just my rough estimate.” 

Even though there are still a few steps left to the goal, FTMO is still doing well. The year before last, it achieved a turnover of 6.8 billion Czech crowns ($350 million) and an EBITDA profit of approximately 2.4 billion ($120 million), and these figures are expected to be even better for the last year. The company does not want to disclose exact results yet, but according to Dušek, it is still on a growth path.

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All information provided herein is intended solely for educational purposes related to trading on financial markets and does not constitute investment advice or serve in any way as a specific investment recommendation. Please read the full disclosure here.