We have seen the development of a ‘Broker in a Box’, which are turn-key solutions that enable IB’s, Money Managers, and Forex participants to quickly begin to run their own brokerage business. Now we have a ‘broker in a link’ from Boston Merchant. Taking existing products one step further, BMFN believes their ‘Broker in a Link’ is the fastest and easiest way to begin marketing a branded white label solution to customers.
Operated on the broker’s UniTrader Trading Platform , the ‘broker in a link’ works as follows. Prospective users enter their name and contact details and are immediately sent a demo trading account and backoffice details. In the back office, users can enter the name of their brand, contact details,image, and platform colors. They are then provided demo and account opening links. These links can then be sent to prospective clients and inserted on the white label’s website. After clicking and downloading the system, clients will receive a branded trading platform from the white label partner. Along with the usual FX and CFD trading interface, the platform also includes pre-set buttons for clients to upgrade their accounts to ‘real’, ability to upload documents, broker details, and deposit widgets. On the backoffice side, the BNFN partner sees in real time the status account registrations and compliance process.
In addition to providing access to customize the trading platform interface and account monitoring, the backoffice is also used to set trading instruments, commissions, spreads, and see earnings in real time. After choosing which FX and CFD instruments to provide to clients, users can then customize trading conditions. BMFN provides a tight raw spread. Beyond the default spreads, an additional markup or spread can be added. The product also provides IBs the ability to offer partnership programs themselves with the creation so sub-IBs.
According to Paul Belogour, Director at BMFN, “introducing brokers still dominate the forex business, and we have built a platform that caters to introducing brokers.” However, Belogour believes that was is lacking from brokers though, are the tools for their partners to succeed. In a comparison to Amazon, the web-retailer provides users the foundation to easily use them to build their virtual storefront, but many times “a broker just gives you some links and says good luck.” Belogour added that “many IB’s that sign up with brokers have no experience with forex, and aren’t able to explain the product. So you have lots of people becoming IBs and very few actually bringing in clients. It becomes a waste of time for the IBs and the sales staff dealing with them.”
With these issues, BMFN wanted to provide two solutions, an easy and streamlined registration process and visible tools for IBs to understand the business. In addition to the above mentioned quick registration process of becoming an IB/WL, Belogour explained that by providing a backoffice system that allows the partners to customize the logo, instruments, commissions etc, “it visually educates the IBs how to make money as an IB and they ‘get it’ quicker.
In terms of compliance, after clients upload documents, the registration reviewed and account on-boarding is done by BMFN. As such, while partners can customize trading conditions such as spreads and instruments, traders are BMFN account holders. BMFN holds a financial license from ASIC (Australia), FSA (UK), BNB-MIFID (Bulgaria) and FFMS (Russia). According to Bologour, BMFN operates local offices in nine countries and is specifically seeing lots of growth and demand for IB products in China, where it has opened four offices.
