Trading.com Names Technical Executive Theofanis Pantelides as New U.S. CEO at Trading.com

Trading.com Markets Inc., one of the few retail foreign-exchange brokers operating under full U.S. regulatory oversight, has appointed Theofanis Pantelides as its next CEO, effective December 2025. This change, which appears in the firm's latest FDM Business Disclosure filing with the National Futures Association (NFA), transitions the U.S. entity's leadership at a pivotal moment.

Pantelides replaces Søren Haagensen, who had overseen the firm's U.S. licensing and early operations. Haagensen, whose background spans two decades at Société Générale and senior roles at Integral and smartTrade, is seen as closing the "build and license" era for the business, having guided the firm through its complex RFED application and the initial rollout of its U.S. platform between 2022 and 2025. According to his LinkedIn profile, Haagensen has now left the firm after more than three years in senior roles at the U.S. subsidiary.

The appointment elevates the firm's most technically oriented executive into the top job at a time when the U.S. entity is shifting entirely to the stringent operational discipline required of a CFTC-registered Retail Foreign Exchange Dealer (RFED). Pantelides initially joined Trading.com in 2019 as Chief Information Officer, playing a key role in developing the technology stack that supported the delayed U.S. rollout, before stepping into the COO role, where he managed operational controls, reporting systems, and platform performance.

His earlier career, which includes senior engineering positions at Integral Development Corp. and FxPro Financial Services, places him in a rare category for a U.S. retail-FX CEO: one with direct experience in execution infrastructure, routing, and order controls. As one observer noted, the move "reads less as a branding exercise and more as a practical restructuring around the firm's most important operational priorities," given that a technically fluent CEO is crucial for navigating the demanding market.

The move underscores the compliance burden in the U.S. RFED environment, which subjects the New York-headquartered firm to strict capital, reporting, and supervisory rules, while prohibiting it from offering CFDs or crypto trading in the U.S. The firm was fined $50,000 by the NFA in 2024 for late financial reporting and weaknesses in internal controls—issues that fall directly under the operational remit Pantelides previously managed as COO. Reliability and reporting accuracy are considered paramount in the small, tightly-regulated U.S. spot FX market.