White label, grey label or turnkey

A grey label is the lightest arrangement. You are effectively a partner operating under somebody else's licence and platform, usually with limited branding and limited control over pricing and instruments. It is cheap to start and hard to build a durable business on, because almost nothing about the operation is actually yours.

A white label means the platform runs under your brand. What varies enormously between vendors is how deep the branding goes and how much of the stack you control. At one end it is a reskinned login page over a shared system. At the other, your brand is applied through the entire build and you have your own infrastructure.

A turnkey package usually bundles the platform with liquidity, payments and services so a founder can launch from one contract. That convenience is real, and the thing to check is what you are locked into and what it costs once the introductory period ends.

There is one question worth asking every vendor, and the answer tells you most of what you need to know. Do all your brokers share one database, or does each get their own? We call it the One-Database Question, and we recommend asking it before price ever comes up.

In a shared system, every broker is a row in somebody else's tables, separated by an identifier in a column. It works, and it is cheaper to run, and it means your book and another broker's book live in the same place separated only by application logic being correct on every single query.

The alternative is a separate deployment and a separate database per brokerage. There is no shared tenant table, so there is no query that could return another broker's data, correct or otherwise. For a business that is going to be supervised and audited, that distinction is worth understanding before you sign rather than afterwards.

Setup fees get quoted and compared. They are rarely the number that matters. The monthly platform fee, per account charges, market data, payment processing and the cost of anything the base package leaves out will dominate your first year.

The other cost is the one nobody quotes. If the platform is a fork of a shared codebase, every fix and every new feature has to be applied to your instance separately, and in practice that means waiting. Running every broker on one well tested codebase means improvements reach you automatically rather than when someone gets to your fork.

Ask what happens when you want to leave, too. Whether your client data and configuration come with you is a question with very different answers depending on which of the three models you signed up for.

Reduced to essentials: a trading terminal clients will use on a phone, a CRM your staff can run, deposits and withdrawals with approval queues, identity verification gating withdrawals, an introducing broker structure with commission reporting, and an audit trail over every sensitive action.

On the client side that means real instrument modelling across forex, metals, oil, indices, crypto and stocks, proper charting, full order types and a genuine margin engine. On the staff side it means a leads pipeline, client profiles, call logging, document review and role based access rather than one shared admin login.

Anything a vendor offers beyond that is worth having. Anything missing from it is something you will be building or buying separately in month two, which is exactly the surprise a turnkey package is supposed to prevent.