Starting a brokerage from South Asia

Several countries in the region place significant restrictions on retail foreign exchange and derivatives activity, on who may offer it, and on moving money across borders for it. Those rules differ by country, they change, and they carry real consequences for founders who assume rather than check.

So the honest first step is not choosing a platform. It is speaking to a lawyer who practises in your country about what you are permitted to do, where you would need to establish, and how the money would lawfully move. Any vendor who skips past that question to talk about their software 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.

In practice, founders here look at where to establish the entity, which regulator that puts them under, which markets they intend to serve, and which payment providers will accept a business of that shape. Those four questions interact, and the answer to one constrains the others.

Payment infrastructure deserves particular attention in this region. It is frequently the binding constraint rather than licensing, and it is worth establishing early what your intended providers will and will not accept, because discovering it after you have registered somewhere is expensive.

Our page comparing offshore jurisdictions sets out how that decision is usually structured, 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 is adapted 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, which matters more here than in most markets: your clients are on phones, often on mid range Android devices, and asking them to download an app is friction you do not need.

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.

Introducing brokers matter enormously in South Asia, 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.