Last year brought significant changes in the financial market, especially for unregulated brokers. For instance, VISA and Mastercard blocked them from using their services. And now, one of the biggest challenges they have to face is to provide their customers with convenient and effective payment methods.
Similar precautions were introduced by most reputable banks around the world who were concerned about the growing number of frauds in the FX industry. Unfortunately, the bad reputation of the industry burdens all market participants – and those who run their businesses professionally and with the right attitude the most. It is widely known that most novice brokers start their business using offshore licenses because they do not require a large investment that startup business would not be able to handle. As a result of the introduced changes, such brokers currently have very few options for collecting money from their clients. Of course, you can always use the support of intermediaries handling money transfers, but this significantly increases the costs of brokerage. Also, if any problems occur, the broker has limited options to counteract.
Another way is to use the payment aggregator system. There are a few companies on the market offering such solutions. One of them is PRAXIS, thanks to which you can access over 300 different payment service providers (PSPs). They support over 1000 various payment methods, including tier-1 acquiring banks, e-wallets, APM’s, and crypto providers. It can be very helpful for the broker to use the knowledge of such company as PRAXIS because they perfectly know what PSPs are available for a given broker taking into account his regulation, payment history and region from where it wants to onboard clients. Additionally, the broker can get an introduction from them, which can significantly shorten the process of getting approved. Also, PRAXIS is already integrated with Match-Trade’s Client Office to ease managing all of your clients’ payments in your FX CRM system.
PRAXIS can be also a very interesting solution for existing regulated brokers, which want to expand to new regions or if they want to simply optimize the management of their payments. Together with gateways, PRAXIS provides full back-office, where brokers can configure various system parameters and see all processed transactions in one place. It is especially important if brokers have many different PSPs, which require a lot of manual work to make daily settlements and accounting.
If you decide to start the onboarding process with a bank, e-wallet or any other PSP, it is important to pay attention to a few aspects. First of all, you need to gather all the company’s documents together with certified copies and passports of all UBOs and Directors. You should also take care of your company website, it should look professional and describe clearly the nature of your business. Last but not least, you need to prepare all legal documents including terms of use, privacy policy, AML/KYC procedures. Usually, PSPs during onboarding process will request these documents from you to check if you comply with their risk policy, so it is worth to prepare them in advance and put on the website before the verification starts.
In case you have an offshore company based in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, you can also ask for a legal opinion from a local law firm. The company can confirm that based on local law, you can legally offer Forex services in countries where FX Business regulation is not mandatory or specified. This can be a very helpful document for some payment service providers and even credit card providers, especially if you want to operate in Asian countries. If you need help in obtaining such a document, contact our experienced experts, they have already supported many brokers in setting up and business.
If any of the above-mentioned standard payment methods are not suitable for your company, the broker can always choose to run a so-called “Crypto Broker”. It is a good option if you don’t want to be dependent on constantly changing legal environment. If you already have a Client Office or a different Trader Room system, it is important to have the Crypto Payment Gateway integrated directly into it, like it was solved in our system.
Being a crypto broker gives you quite a lot of flexibility, but the major drawback is that your clients need to know how to send and receive cryptocurrencies. Based on our experience we recommend brokers to add Crypto Payment Gateways as an additional service, which can increase monthly deposits, reduce costs and give more flexibility to your clients. However, the broker should try to add standard paths of collecting payments at the same time to cover also the clients who are not familiar with cryptocurrencies.
If you are serious about growing your brokerage you need to choose the one solution that suits your business the most. If you need to consult – contact Match-Trade Technologies. Our experienced team will help you with: company registration, legal opinions, PSP onboarding (300+), setting up a fully automated crypto payment gateway solution (Match2Pay).