Coverage

Systems

Platforms, liquidity and payments

2026

Comparison · 7 min 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. 25 Aug

Decision · 12 min 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.