One of three starting positions. The others are linked below — read the one you are in rather than all three.
How to start a forex brokerage
Where you are
You have no stack, no accounts and no flow. You may not have the licence yet either. What you have is a decision to make about order: which of these things blocks which, and what you can start before the rest is done.
What you are actually deciding
Not which vendor. The decision at this stage is sequencing — what to commit to first so that you are not paying for a platform while waiting on a bank, or waiting on a platform while your licence sits idle.
The one section that differs completely between these three pages.
What has to move.
- 01
Nothing yet
This is the only one of the three situations with no migration. No accounts to carry, no history to convert, no cutover to rehearse. It is the cheapest position to be in technically and the most expensive to be in commercially, because nothing is earning.
- 02
Your commercial model, into configuration
Instruments, spreads, leverage tiers, account types and your partner structure exist as decisions before they exist as settings. The work is turning decisions into configuration, which is why the technical setup is short and the deciding is not.
And what does not have to happen
- Waiting on a platform vendor’s onboarding queue before you can configure anything.
- Paying for a platform licence during the months your licence application is with a regulator.
- Discovering after signing that your chosen platform cannot express your commission structure.
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
Decide jurisdiction
This decides your capital requirement, your banking options and which clients you may solicit. Everything else depends on it.
blocked by: nothing — this can start today
- 02
Start licensing and banking together
They run in parallel and both are slow. Banking is usually the longer of the two and the one people start too late.
blocked by: Jurisdiction
- 03
Decide the commercial model
Instruments, spreads, leverage, account tiers, partner commissions. None of this needs a platform to decide and all of it is needed to configure one.
blocked by: nothing — this can start today
- 04
Arrange liquidity
Provider agreements and credit are yours to negotiate. We build the sessions; the relationship is between you and them.
blocked by: Jurisdiction, because credit terms depend on your entity
- 05
Technical setup
Configuration, integration, then testing and handover — the documented three-day sequence. It sits near the end because it depends on the decisions above, not because it is slow.
blocked by: The commercial model, and liquidity credentials for the integration step
- 06
Go live with a controlled first cohort
A small group of real accounts before the marketing spend starts. Every launch finds something, and finding it with twenty accounts is cheaper than with two thousand.
blocked by: Licence, banking, technical setup
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.
- Banking started last
- The most common and most expensive ordering mistake. A licence with no bank account is a licence you cannot trade under, and the queue does not care that everything else is ready.
- Platform bought before the model is decided
- Paying a monthly fee to hold a configuration you are still arguing about internally. The platform is not the bottleneck at this stage and buying it early does not make it one.
- Marketing spend before the first cohort
- Acquisition cost is usually the largest first-year line. Spending it before you know the onboarding flow works converts a fixable problem into a refund queue.
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
- Onboarding, KYC workflow and the trader’s room are what a new brokerage lives or dies on in month one. It is the piece that touches your first client before anything else does.
- ForgeQuote
- Your spread and markup are your revenue model. Configuring them yourself rather than requesting changes is what lets you adjust in the first weeks, when you will need to.
Questions that come up.
- Can we start the technical setup before the licence comes through?
- Yes, and it is usually the right order: the environment is configured and tested while the application is with the regulator, so going live is a switch rather than a project. What you cannot do is take real client money before the licence exists.
- Do we need liquidity arranged before you can build anything?
- No. The environment is configured and exercised against a test feed, and the provider sessions are brought up when your credentials exist. The build does not wait on your negotiation.
- What is genuinely not in scope for you?
- Licensing, incorporation, banking, liquidity agreements and your compliance function. We are a software and infrastructure vendor. Anyone offering to arrange all of it is either reselling introductions or overstating what they do.
- How much of this can we do without deciding on us?
- All of it except the technical setup. Jurisdiction, banking, the commercial model and liquidity are yours regardless of platform, and none of them are easier because you have picked one. Starting them now is not a commitment to us.
4open items on this page
- A jurisdiction comparison worth linking to — the guide is scaffolded but needs legal review before it can be published.
- What a realistic first-year budget looks like. That guide is blocked on published pricing.
- 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.