Starting a brokerage from India

In India, retail foreign exchange sits inside a defined perimeter. Residents may trade only specified currency derivatives on recognised Indian exchanges, and the Reserve Bank of India maintains an Alert List of entities that are neither authorised to deal in forex under the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999 nor licensed to operate an electronic trading platform for it. The RBI has expanded that list repeatedly since it was introduced and states plainly that it is not exhaustive. Separately, the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, which governs how a resident may send money abroad, does not permit remittance for margin trading or margin calls, so the funding route most offshore platforms rely on is closed at the source.

So the honest first step is not choosing a platform. It is speaking to a lawyer who practises in India about what you are permitted to offer, whether you would need to establish outside the country, and how funds would lawfully move. Any vendor who talks past that question to sell you their platform is not doing you a favour.

We build brokerage software. We are not lawyers, we do not give regulatory advice, and we would rather say so plainly than imply a competence we do not have.

Given that perimeter, most India based founders who proceed establish the operating entity outside the country and serve international clients, under a regulator and a banking setup that will accept a business of that shape. That is a legal, tax and banking decision, and it belongs with advisers who can see your full position rather than a page like this one.

Stated directly: the working pattern is not to onboard Indian residents at all. The book is international, Indian residents are commonly excluded in the client terms, and the LRS restrictions on funding overseas trading accounts are precisely why. A brokerage run from India that pitches Indian clients is a different and far harder conversation, and it is one to have with counsel, not with a software vendor.

What we can say is that the software does not depend on where you land. The platform is identical wherever the entity sits, so the structuring conversation and the technology conversation can run in parallel instead of one blocking the other.

Our page on offshore jurisdictions sets out how that decision is usually framed, again without recommending one, because that recommendation should come from someone advising you rather than someone selling to you.

The platform is the same regardless of where you establish. Instruments, leverage limits, account types and document requirements are configuration rather than code, so the software adapts to the regime you operate under instead of assuming one.

Clients get a trading terminal covering forex majors and crosses, gold and silver, oil, stock indices, crypto and US stocks, each with its own spread, contract size, pip size and digit precision. Charting spans nine timeframes with more than thirty indicators. Order handling covers market, limit and stop with take profit, stop loss and trailing stops, over a real margin engine.

It installs to the home screen on iOS and Android in one tap and opens full screen like a native app. In India, where an enormous share of clients are on mid range Android phones, not asking them to find and download an app removes real friction.

Your team gets a leads pipeline with campaign attribution, client profiles that consolidate accounts, money, trades, documents and calls, document review gating withdrawals, approval queues on money movement, and role based access across admin, manager, retention and sales.

The introducing broker and affiliate network is where a great deal of Indian growth comes from, and the partner side is built in rather than bolted on. Multi tier structures, per partner commission rules and reporting that settles them without a spreadsheet.

Everything runs on your brand, your domain and your own database, on a deployment separate from every other broker. There is no shared tenant table and no vendor name anywhere your clients or staff can see.