One of three starting positions. The others are linked below — read the one you are in rather than all three.
From introducing broker to full broker
Where you are
You have the flow, the relationships and the partner tree. What you do not have is your own book, and someone else currently holds your clients’ records, your commission logic and the data that proves the tree is yours.
What you are actually deciding
Whether the flow you introduce is worth more as commission or as your own spread — and, before that, whether you can take the tree with you at all. The second question decides the first.
The one section that differs completely between these three pages.
What has to move.
- 01
Your partner tree, with its levels intact
Multi-level structures do not survive a lossy export. If the levels flatten, the commission logic that made the tree valuable stops working and rebuilding it by hand is where these transitions die.
- 02
Client records and their history
Not just names. The relationship history is what makes a client yours rather than someone you once referred, and it is the part a departing IB is most often unable to extract.
- 03
Your commission logic, as configuration
The rules you negotiated with each partner become settings you own rather than terms in someone else’s system. Configured, not rebuilt — the arithmetic is yours, we express it.
And what does not have to happen
- Rebuilding a multi-level partner tree from a spreadsheet export.
- Asking your current principal for the data mid-negotiation, which tells them exactly what you are doing.
- Running two commission systems in parallel while the tree is split between them.
In what order.
Order and dependency, not duration. What blocks what is the part a plan can be honest about; how long each takes depends on a regulator, a bank and a counterparty, none of whom answer to us.
- 01
Establish what you can actually extract
Before anything else. Read your current agreement for what data is yours, and test an export rather than trusting a clause. This is the step that decides whether the rest is possible.
blocked by: nothing — this can start today
- 02
Map the tree explicitly
Levels, rates, overrides and the exceptions nobody wrote down. Most trees have side agreements that exist only in email, and those are the ones that break after a migration.
blocked by: Knowing what the export contains
- 03
Licensing and banking for your own entity
Becoming the broker rather than the introducer means becoming the regulated party. Slow, parallel, and independent of the technical work.
blocked by: nothing — this can start today
- 04
Configure the tree and the commission rules
The mapped structure becomes configuration, with the exceptions written down as rules rather than remembered.
blocked by: The tree map
- 05
Move partners in groups
Not all at once. A group at a time, with commission reconciled against the old system for each group before the next moves.
blocked by: Configured tree, licence
- 06
Close the old arrangement
Last, and only once every group reconciles. The overlap costs a little and the alternative costs a partner relationship.
blocked by: Every group reconciled
Written from the ways this goes wrong, not the ways it goes right.
How this goes wrong.
Each of these has happened to someone in your position. They are listed because the ordering advice above only makes sense once you know what it is protecting you from.
- The tree flattens in export
- Levels become a single list, overrides vanish, and the structure you spent years building has to be reconstructed from memory and email. Test the export before you commit to the move, not after.
- Partners find out from the old principal
- Requesting a full data export mid-negotiation is a signal. Sequence the extraction question before the conversation, not during it.
- Commission disagrees for one month
- A partner whose first statement under the new arrangement is wrong does not extend much patience. Reconciling group by group against the old system is slower and is why this works.
What carries the weight here.
The whole stack comes as one thing, so this is not a shopping list. It is which parts do the work in this situation, and why.
- ForgeCRM
- The IB and affiliate management is the whole of this transition. Multi-level structures, commission rules and the migration of an existing tree with its levels and history are what this page is about.
- ForgeRails
- Partner payouts stop being someone else’s statement and become a withdrawal flow you approve, with the trail attached to the same record.
Questions that come up.
- Can you migrate a multi-level tree, or does it flatten?
- Levels and history migrate. The honest caveat is that we can only import what your current principal exports — if their export flattens the structure, we can rebuild it from your mapping but we cannot recover what was never in the file. That is why testing the export comes first.
- What about the side agreements that were never in the system?
- They have to be written down and configured as rules. This is unglamorous and it is the step that decides whether commission is right in month one. We will ask you for them explicitly rather than discovering them later.
- Do our partners have to do anything?
- They get new credentials and a new portal. Their rates and levels do not change unless you change them, and moving in groups means any problem affects a few partners rather than all of them.
- Can we run as an IB and as a broker at the same time?
- For a period, yes, and that is usually how it goes — some partners move while others stay. Reconciling two commission systems is real work, so it is a transition state rather than an arrangement.
4open items on this page
- A worked example of a tree migration with real structure. Needs a customer willing to have theirs described, anonymised.
- Which principals’ export formats we have imported before. Naming them would be the most useful thing on this page and we should only name ones we have actually done.
- Pricing, which is a commercial decision that has not been made. No "from" figure appears here.
- Timelines beyond the documented three-day technical setup. Anything else would be a figure without a measurement.
See it before you decide.
The demo is the whole stack with your own credentials. For this situation in particular, the thing worth reading first is what happens if you want to leave again.