Starting your own forex brokerage as an introducing broker

Clients who already trade and already trust you. A network of sub-IBs who bring clients of their own. And marketing that works: the channels, languages, content and local reputation that produce funded accounts rather than sign-ups.

Each has a limit worth knowing before you plan around it. Your clients' accounts, balances and trade history belong to the partner broker's records, so nothing is copied across: every client who follows you opens a new account with your brokerage, signs your agreement and passes your identity checks. Read your IB agreement with a lawyer before you tell anyone, because some contain terms on approaching clients or partners after you leave. And a client who relied on your partner's licence will ask about yours, so have the answer and the regulator's register entry ready from the first conversation.

Marketing changes in a quieter way. As an IB you promoted another firm's product; as the broker, every financial promotion, risk warning and advertising approval is yours to get right in each country you target, and the major ad platforms check financial advertisers before their ads run.

The steps are much alike in every jurisdiction: a company, directors the regulator accepts as fit and proper, a business plan, compliance manuals, regulatory capital paid in, then the application and the regulator's questions. Approval can take a few weeks or most of a year. Capital and fees, jurisdiction by jurisdiction gives the capital and regulator fees for each, from the regulators' own documents.

Match the licence to how your orders will be filled. On our platform the brokerage is the counterparty to every client trade, whether it keeps the trade in-house or covers it with its liquidity provider, so the licence has to allow dealing as principal. An intermediary licence such as Labuan money broking can look closer to the IB work you know, but it does not allow dealing as principal and so does not suit the platform.

Choose the jurisdiction together with your payment providers, not ahead of them, and ask which licences they accept before registering anywhere. Remember too that a licence reaches only as far as its own regulator's permission. Clients living in a country whose rules restrict them stay restricted, which matters to an IB whose clients may be spread across several countries.

As the broker you decide, client by client. Keep a client's trades in-house and your brokerage carries the risk and keeps the spread and the outcome of each trade, or fill the client straight away and cover the trade with your liquidity provider. The setting lives on each client's page in the CRM, can be changed at any time and leaves open trades where they are. Execution and liquidity on the platform explains both.

We are not a liquidity provider and never hold client money. Keep a provider you already know, perhaps from your years as an IB, or we introduce you to a regulated one; either way the agreement is between your brokerage and the provider. Whichever way trades go, someone on your team has to watch the book from the first day.

Clients reach the terminal on your brand from a phone or a desktop. It sits on the home screen after one tap on Android or a short guided step on iOS, with no app store involved, and quotes forex, gold and silver, oil, stock indices, crypto and US stocks, every instrument carrying its own spread, contract size and digits. Leverage is yours to set per account type and per account. The margin engine follows each account's live equity and free margin, sends a warning at margin call and, at the stop out level you choose, closes positions on its own, biggest loser first, and an admin can write a negative balance back to zero in the CRM with the change on record.

A brokerage needs its own corporate account, usually a separate client money account, and payment providers for cards, e-wallets, local transfers and crypto, and each one looks closely at your company before it signs. Many hold back a rolling reserve, a share of what you process kept for months. Open these talks in the same week as the licence work, and put the payment questions first.

Compliance becomes yours too: KYC and AML procedures, a compliance officer and a money laundering reporting officer, client agreements, risk warnings and records kept as long as your regulator asks. In the CRM, deposits and withdrawals go through instantly or wait for approval, your choice, against the bank and payment details you set; a client's identity documents are reviewed before any withdrawal leaves; and sensitive staff actions are written to an audit trail.

Support and retention were mostly the partner broker's job, and now they decide whether clients stay. The CRM runs on your brand with a leads pipeline that records sources and assignment, one record per client holding accounts, money, trades, documents and calls, and five roles from admin to sales, so each agent sees only their own book. Pricing is a flat monthly fee, $1,250 on Starter or $2,500 on Growth, with no setup fee, no revenue share and the first month free.

In the multi-level IB module each partner gets an account and a referral link, clients who join through that link are attributed to them, and one partner can sit under another, so a network up to five levels deep can be rebuilt beneath your brokerage.

Commissions are a fixed amount per lot on the closed trades of each partner's clients. You set a base rate, and separate rates per instrument category where you want them, and every partner above the direct one earns their own override rate. Overrides start at zero, so nothing is paid upstream until you choose, and the rate used is stored with each payment, so a later change never alters past figures. Partners follow their own referrals and earnings in a portal inside the terminal and see nothing else.

Two limits, stated plainly. The module pays per lot, so a sub-IB on a share of revenue today moves to a per lot rate you agree together. And you are now the one paying these commissions out of your own revenue, so test each rate against your spreads and running costs before you offer it to anyone.

Licensing and payments take months and set the date, while the platform is set up within a week once you are happy with the demo. The full step by step guide goes deeper on each stage.