Starting a brokerage from the Philippines

Its advisory of 20 October 2016, prompted by complaints from retail investors who had lost money, said commodity futures trading in the Philippines, including foreign exchange trading as the Commission has consistently held, and the rules on it were still suspended. It also pointed to a 1993 Supreme Court ruling, Onapal v. Court of Appeals, which treated contracts settled on price differences as gambling and void.

The advisory of 30 October 2018 went further. It told the public to stop investing through foreign-registered platforms offering commodity futures, contracts for difference, indices and binary options, and said the people acting as their brokers, salesmen or agents hold no licence to deal in them.

The latest, signed on 17 August 2026, covers online platforms, managed accounts, copy and mirror trading, trading bots and proprietary trading programmes. It repeats that forex trading undertaken as a commodity futures activity remains suspended pending a regulatory framework, and adds two points every founder should read twice. A licence from a foreign regulator does not by itself let a firm offer securities or take investments in the Philippines, and an ordinary SEC company registration does not either. Promoters, recruiters, agents, account managers and influencers may be held liable as well. The advisory leaves ordinary bank foreign exchange, such as payments for trade, travel and remittances, untouched.

The 2026 advisory makes the second half matter: local introducers, affiliates or influencers recruiting Filipino clients are exactly the people it warns may be liable. Whether staff based in the Philippines may serve clients abroad is a question for counsel, settled before anyone is hired.

Funding the offshore company is a central bank question. Under section 43 of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas foreign exchange manual, a resident may invest abroad without prior BSP approval using their own foreign currency deposits or foreign exchange bought outside the banking system, and may buy foreign exchange from banks for investments under section 44 up to USD 60 million a year without prior approval, with a notice to the BSP above that. Section 44 covers instruments issued offshore by non-residents that are not contrary to Philippine law, and dividends or sale proceeds from such investments need not be brought back and sold for pesos.

Choose the jurisdiction with the dealing model in mind. 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 abroad must allow dealing as principal. Our comparison of regulators that license offshore brokers and our breakdown of licence, capital and running costs help with the shortlist. None of this replaces advice from a lawyer who practises in the Philippines.

Those limits come from the regulator that licenses you, and the platform applies them account by account: leverage is set per account type and per individual account, and the stop out runs automatically at the levels you configure.

Clients open the terminal on a phone or a desktop and install it to the home screen, with one tap on Android and a short guided step on iOS, no app store involved. They trade forex, gold and silver, oil, stock indices, crypto and US stocks, every instrument carrying its own spread, contract size and digits. The margin engine tracks equity and free margin live, warns at margin call and, at stop out, closes the biggest loser first. Where your licence expects losses beyond the deposit to be absorbed, an admin writes a negative balance back to zero in the CRM and the adjustment stays on record.

The CRM runs on your own brand with a leads pipeline that records each lead's source and owner, so you can show where clients came from. Each client has one record holding accounts, money, trades, documents and calls, and five roles from admin to sales keep every agent inside their own book.

Compliance staff review identity documents in the CRM before any withdrawal is paid, so a file showing a Philippine address reaches a person who can apply your residency policy. Deposits and withdrawals are instant or approved, as you decide, against the bank and payment details you set, and sensitive staff actions go into an audit trail. See plans and prices: one flat monthly fee, no setup fee, and the first month free.