Cost of starting an unregulated forex broker business

What is the cost to start a forex broker business?

Unregulated in some banana republic versus regulated.

ROFL so funny. I don't have a real clue but this is just a wild guess:

In the US you need deposit a $50M security to the regulation authorities just to allow yourself to say "Hey I'm a broker". It must be the same in the other countries. If unregulated in some banana republic you may have to offer the same by under the table...

Liquidity providers of yours will ask the same kind of deposit just to secure that you'll pay them; unless you become a white label broker of an introducing broker who will make you uncompetitive due to the extra cost of their own margin.

Then you can order a $100k web site to advertise you exists and make your targetted gamblers (oops clients!) to forget you're unregulated. A good marketing guy is ~$100k/yr. A cheap customer care hotline in an exotic country is ~10K/mo.

The license for MT4 server is around $100k (from what I could find that's strangely not public) without the setup fees. A bunch of servers to run it and an IT guy: $15k/mo.

The (net un-matched) transactions of your clients must be paid within 2 business days to the banks. So a few millions treasury is also required because you'll offer crazy leverage, won't you?

Question: how much money do you expect to generate by being a broker?

I think if brokerages were great (high profit margin) businesses they'd be universally more attentive to customer needs and wouldn't resort to dirty tricks to squeeze profits from their 'clients' at every opportunity.

I don't dispute PipMeUp's estimates, apart from these two:


These days, even if you hired a design firm (unnecessary) a Wix/Weebly site will not set you back more than $200/yr over the lifetime of your brokerage. A phone hotline (800 number) can also be set up for (much) less than $1000.00 per year, using VOIP, with a PBX included. You can probably colocate the server, but maybe not, if your ping suffers and customers complain about poor execution. I wonder if you could strike a deal with one of the VPS providers, like Beeks? If you are not going to hire that Biz Dev guy, then you at least need a few people to make cold calls, and good salespeople aren't cheap.

As PipMeUp stated your major expense will be licensing MT4 and getting set up with your liquidity providers who will demand heavy surety, even if you have loads of experience in the industry.

Also, are you going to be the one who answers that phone and the live chat messages? If not, that's another expense.

Yes, I agree with forexxrookie, that actually depends on the services you avail and package you take like
- Opening up of corporate bank accounts ( here different banks will have different costs)
- Company formation
- Obtaining license
- Risk management etc,
The best way is search and contact a broker providing white or grey label solution and you can ask for all the associated costs, even some brokers can help you in setting up of offshore brokerage house and getting a corporate bank account as well.