Business interview: Plus500's bomb disposal expert Asaf Elimelech on defusing spread-betting crackdown

But only last week Plus500 was upgrading profit guidance for the year again, this time helped by Brexit volatility in currency markets sending the pound see-sawing.

And the short-sellers? “Every shareholder or investor has his own angles and intentions. We are not saying no to meeting short-sellers, and presenting the company to tell our stories. When you meet a short-seller and he explains why he chooses to go short and [you] attack those points, I won’t say you feel good about it, but you have delivered the message.”

What Elimelech has in his favour — and what his rivals covet — is an unrivalled marketing machine with a fearsome reputation. The head office in Haifa is virtually next door to Israel’s Technion institute, whose graduates have spread far and wide in the business world. There are no call centres; some 90% of his “marketing” staff are actually software engineers, targeting customers through Google. Plus500 also poached Google executive Ari Shotland as its chief technology officer this year to keep its lead.

One industry source calls it a “marketing machine with a spread-betting firm attached”, saying: “We’d always been interested in them as they were a great fit but the valuation kept going and going and going. From our point of view Plus500 has the best technology, particularly their customer acquisition tools. They’ve got algorithms that can tell you things like when a certain demographic in Germany likes buying VW shares on a Friday night and target accordingly.”

Automation is the key, according to Elimelech: its customer acquisition costs are much lower, so it can operate in markets where it makes less sense for others.

But Elimelech, who earned £2.2 million last year, isn’t a techie; the firm was founded by Gal Haber, Alon Gonen and Elad Ben-Yitzhak, three “crazy geniuses” in Haber’s words, who met in high school in Haifa and went to Technion, where they brought three more on board.

Haber, whose background is online gaming, is still the managing director. Elimelech’s background is an economics and accounting degree, which came after a spell in the elite Yahalom combat engineering unit of the Israeli Defence Forces.

He was picked out for officer training when he was still a teenager at the time of the Second Intifada, when three soldiers from his unit were abducted by Hezbollah in the Golan Heights.

He later worked in bomb disposal. “It was not very pleasant,” he adds, but the army “helps you grow up”. “You get a weapon, learn to use it smartly. It’s tense, tough work.” Later his introduction to Plus500 came through a colleague at PwC, who was Gonen’s wife. When she had a baby, Gonen wasted little time tapping him up for the fledgling company and he joined in 2012, moving his young family to Australia to set up Plus500’s outpost there.

But when he got back to Israel, he was soon working on a corporate bomb-disposal job as the company was plunged into its worst crisis so far.

In 2015, concerns over its money-laundering controls from the Financial Conduct Authority left more than half of its UK accounts — tens of thousands of customers — frozen, as it desperately brought in dozens of extra staff to check the identity of their customers. The wags were quick to mock as well, wondering when it would change its name to Minus500 as the share price plunged.

Elimelech was the pointman with the FCA, working through the crisis as it took until early 2016 for it to start signing up UK customers again. The turmoil brought an opportunistic 400p-a-share takeover offer from software firm Playtech, which was approved by the Plus board but vetoed by the FCA.

Why? “I didn’t ask why. I’m just pleased that it didn’t happen.” Elimelech, who took over as chief executive in 2016 when the turbulence was subsiding, points out that the pain of missing out for Playtech was eased by the huge £100 million-plus profit it made on its stake.

And as for crossing the FCA, he adds: “I’m confident that we won’t we have those issues again.”

The shares took two years to recover the lost ground, though. One top-10 shareholder said: “The market can be a bit distrustful with Israeli stocks but if they had something to hide why would they want to move to the main market? They are trying to be very transparent, and with Asaf you need a different skillset to the entrepreneurial mindset founding the company.

“Part of the reason they have been successful is because they own their own tech. The others have been sniffy, but that is because they have been caught napping.”

Elimelech, a Maccabi Haifa football fanatic who grows pineapples in his spare time, is concentrating on growth but doesn’t rule out some kind of deal further down the line.

“Anything could happen in the future, not necessarily Playtech, other opportunities. We are working to grow the business. We have amazing technology and I guess it is something that a lot of companies would like to put their hands on.”

And, fingers crossed, he won’t need to be calling on those bomb-disposal skills again.