Can New Offshore Brokers Adapt to MetaQuotes’ Tightened White Label Policy?

MT4/5 is the top choice trading platform among CFD brokers, even white labels. But, MetaQuotes’ new white label requirements are troubling new offshore brokers.

Since 2018, MetaQuotes has not been selling MT4 full servers because of its campaign for brokers to transit to its newer technologically-advanced MT5 trading platform. Hence, new brokers looking to offer forex and CFD services depend on white-label offerings from established brokers that have access to the MT4 servers to kick off their own brokerages, hence saving costs.

In addition, MetaQuotes offers white-label services to brokerages who use the software provider’s infrastructure to run their own forex and CFD brands. Opting for MetaQuotes’ white label service has been said to be much more expensive than patronising established brokers.

While this arrangement has been going on for years, prospective forex and CFD brokers are finding it hard to be onboarded by white-label services to kick off their new brands. This difficulty has been attributed to tougher requirements being requested by MetaQuotes from brokers before processing their white-label requests.

Let’s see what are the requirements now, including those recently added, for MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 White Labels:

• Certificate of Incorporation
• Register of Directors and Register of Shareholders
• Registered and Physical Address
• Corporate Account Verification

The toughest of these requirements is corporate account verification.

New brokers are also required to provide a recent Certificate of Good Standing or a Certificate of Incumbency (if the company is older than six months), and confirmation of domain ownership with registration details in the company’s full name.

They are also to provide a certified reference letter or statement issued by the bank. This statement, which verifies the existence of an active bank account, must contain the company’s registration number and registered address.

Furthermore, one of the latest onboarding requirements is for the key persons behind the brokerage to verify their identity on video recording with their passports or identity cards.

Corporate account verification is a big challenge because most brokers choose to start out in jurisdictions such as Seychelles, Vanuatu and St Vincent and the Grenadines where regulations are less stringent in order to save cost.

Compared to ‘onshore’ locations, offshore jurisdictions’ requirements from news brokers are easier to meet; hence, they attract many smaller-sized brokers who want to break into the retail trading industry.

The official website of MetaQuotes – metaquotes.net

MetaQuotes Background

Trading platform MetaTrader 4 (MT4) since its introduction in 2005 has grown to be a giant in the online foreign exchange industry. The software is now comfortably the number one choice for online retail forex traders.

MT4, which was primarily built for the forex market, was developed by MetaQuotes, a leading software development company that serves brokerages, banks, and exchanges.

In 2010, MetaQuotes introduced MetaTrader 5 (MT5), an upgraded version of the trading platform. The newer trading platform came with added features, such as support for trading in CFDs, stocks, options, and futures markets.

On June 7, 2021, MetaQuotes reported that MT5 became a more popular platform than MT4 for the first time in history. The developer reported at the time that the number of lines of MetaTrader 5 code “exceeded 7 million” when the previous version numbered “only 2 million”.

These statistics prove the decades-long patronage MetaQuotes has been enjoying from both on- and offshore entities in the retail forex and CFD industry.