Lead story · Decision · 7 min

Broker Onboarding Funnel Benchmarks: Signup to Funded Account

There is no public benchmark for signup-to-funded conversion in CFD brokerage: no broker, CRM vendor or regulator publishes the rate, so the number most quoted in planning meetings is the one with least evidence behind it. What is verifiable points at the two stages where the funnel leaks most: identity verification and first funding. Jumio's 2026 study of 8,003 consumers found 38% would choose a less secure or less convenient platform to avoid identity checks altogether, and one in three would avoid a platform entirely rather than provide personal data for age verification (Jumio 2026 Online Identity Study). The enforcement record runs the other way: the FCA fined Starling Bank £28,959,426 on 2 October 2024 after its automated screening had, since 2017, checked customers against only a fraction of the sanctions list (FCA press release, first published 2 October 2024).

The Desk Team · 28 Aug 2026Read full article →

More from the desk

Primer

Liberalisation at Last Reaches the Payments Layer that Matters to Forex Brokers

The National Bank of Ukraine has again loosened its wartime foreign-exchange restrictions, according to an EY alert published on 27 August 2026. The direct consequence for forex and CFD brokers is that Ukrainian residents and businesses now have a broader legal channel to move money across the border — for funding accounts, paying platform fees, and eventually for capital repatriation — which means payment routing, KYC source-of-funds logic and UAH hedging assumptions all need to be updated now, not when the central bank publishes its next communication.

The Desk Team · 27 Aug 2026

Comparison

Build vs Buy: How CFD Brokers Choose a Trading Platform Stack

The build-versus-buy decision for a CFD broker's trading platform is not settled by engineering at all: it is settled by scale, by where the broker's differentiation lives, and by regulation — and the market's answer, on the available evidence, is that almost everyone buys while a few large listed brands build. MetaQuotes claims "hundreds of brokers and banks" serve "millions of traders" on MetaTrader 5 (MT5 for brokers) — a vendor claim, because no platform vendor publishes audited adoption figures — and the one nine-figure build number in public belongs to CMC Markets, which says it has invested over £100m in its proprietary platform (CMC Markets). In between sits a market where Match-Trade is the only vendor among the four compared here that publishes list prices, at $2,500–$5,000 per month (Match-Trader pricing), MetaQuotes quotes privately and insists on self-hosting (MT5 purchase page), and a regulatory floor — national leverage caps in force since 2019–2020 (ESMA product intervention) and DORA's third-party regime, applied since 17 January 2025 (ESMA DORA) — decides the borderline cases.

The Desk Team · 25 Aug 2026

Also on the desk

01Decision

Cybersecurity Priorities for Forex and CFD Brokers in 2026

By mid-2026 the cybersecurity agenda for forex and CFD brokers is set by the regulatory calendar more than by the threat feed. The EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has applied since 17 January 2025, UK firms have been past the Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) 31 March 2025 operational-resilience deadline for well over a year, NIS2 transposition closed in October 2024, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is running FY2026 examinations that explicitly probe ransomware response and AI-related controls. IBM and the Ponemon Institute put the global average cost of a data breach at a record US$4.99 million in their 2026 report, with AI-driven attacks up 56% year on year. The resulting priorities for a broker are practical rather than exotic: incident classification and reporting readiness, supervised third-party concentration, AI-enabled fraud and social engineering, identity and access control, and recovery evidence a supervisor can inspect.

25 Aug 2026Read the piece →

02Comparison

PAMM and MAM Account Structures: Regulatory Risk for Brokers

The regulatory risk in a PAMM or MAM product is not the software that allocates trades. It is the classification of the arrangement itself, decided by two facts: who holds discretion over client money, and whether client funds are pooled. A PAMM, where client money sits in a single master account traded under one manager's power of attorney, maps onto the statutory definitions of a collective investment scheme under UK law (FSMA 2000, s.235) and of a commodity pool under US law (CFTC Regulation 4.10(d)(1)). A MAM, where each client keeps a separate account, avoids the pooling test but is discretionary management of client portfolios — a licence-triggering activity in the UK and EU, and, in Australia, an arrangement ASIC says can constitute a managed discretionary account regardless of its terminology. For a forex or CFD broker the consequence is commercial: sell a managed-account product through an entity licensed only for dealing and execution, and the exposure comes from the structure, not the code.

25 Aug 2026Read the piece →

03Primer

Overnight Japan Equity CFDs With Knock-Outs Are Here. The Tokyo Close Just Became a Product-Design Problem.

FOREX.com has launched what it claims is the first combined service for trading Japan single-stock CFDs and knock-out barrier features during the hours when the Tokyo cash market is closed. The commercial reading is straightforward — more instrument choice for clients — but the operational reading is the one that matters: every CFD broker that lists Japanese equities now has to decide whether the 15:30 JST close remains a hard boundary of its own product, and that decision forces real work on gap risk, barrier-event detection, corporate-action processing, and the regulatory line between a stop order and a product feature.

24 Aug 2026Read the piece →

04Primer

Warsh's Jackson Hole Debut Turns the Fed into a Pricing Unknown

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh will deliver his first Jackson Hole speech as chair when the Kansas City Fed opens its annual symposium in Grand Teton National Park later this week, Forex Factory reported on 23 August 2026. The consequence is a repricing, not a speech: the market's working assumption that the 3.50%-3.75% policy rate inherited from Jay Powell remains the base case for the rest of 2026 is now contestable, and every dollar-denominated swap rate, CFD funding charge, and margin threshold in a brokerage stack prices against Warsh's on-the-record views, which are more hawkish than his predecessor's.

23 Aug 2026Read the piece →

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