As trading markets become more saturated, digital traders are no longer satisfied with single-asset brokerages that only offer niche trading opportunities. With a multi-asset brokerage, you will let traders consolidate their portfolios and stay loyal to your platform, increasing the customer lifetime value by orders of magnitude.
So, a multi-asset model is the definitive strategy in 2026. But what does it take to turn this brokerage model into a fully-functioning, high-yield business? Let’s dive in.
Key Takeaways
- Multi-asset brokerages require tight liquidity management, a scalable technology stack and a careful mix of assets on offer.
- If constructed well, multi-asset brokerages offer the greatest risk mitigation for businesses, coupled with reliably high returns.
- Multi-asset brokerages let businesses build a stable audience of loyal traders with a significant customer lifetime value.
Multi-Asset Brokerages: A trend that’s here to stay in 2026
Multi-asset brokerages emerged as trading demand shifted rapidly in the late 2010s. The rise of cryptocurrencies pushed retail traders beyond forex, increasing the need for portfolio diversification across multiple asset classes.
The COVID-19 era accelerated this shift, massively expanding digital trading while saturating individual markets. As a result, traders were forced to explore new instruments and strategies to stay competitive.
Today, even beginner traders understand diversification as a basic risk-management principle. For this reason, multi-asset brokerages have become the default model for new brokerage firms—and they’re not going anywhere.
That said, building a multi-asset trading platform is complex. It requires solid technical foundations, business strategy, and a deep understanding of multiple trading sectors. Here’s where to start:
Step 1: Define Your Multi-Asset Brokerage Model and Target Market
Before diving into technical details, it’s important to decide who’s going to be your target audience. There are several choices here – you can focus on professional traders and provide highly specialised trading instruments and tools, allowing them to execute complex trading strategies. On the flipside, the retail trading audience requires much less complexity, but demands a strong business presence to attract casual traders.
It’s also possible to provide services for smaller proprietary firms, acting as a B2B provider. While profitable, this brokerage model is highly sophisticated and requires significant initial capital.
Finally, regional markets often prove profitable, with brokerages setting up their shop in specific regions to fill the demand gap. With regional markets, it’s easier to stay competitive, but you need to either have or acquire significant knowledge about the region’s economy, legislation and many other aspects to become profitable. It’s important to carefully consider pros and cons and commit to your choice.
Step 2: Choose Which Asset Classes to Offer (and Which to Delay)
While the long-term goal is asset diversity, new brokerages should start with the most liquid instruments. Liquidity is the single most important factor in trading—it directly determines execution quality, volume, and overall viability.
For an emerging multi-asset brokerage, this means focusing on highly traded assets in forex, crypto, and commodities. Instruments like major FX pairs, gold, and Bitcoin are well understood in terms of risk, liquidity behavior, and operational constraints, making them safer foundations to build on.
A common approach is either a conservative mix of 20–30 assets or a broader but slightly riskier 30–50 asset offering. This typically includes major forex pairs, key indices, core commodities, and established cryptocurrencies. Final asset selection should always reflect your target market, region, and regulatory environment—so choose deliberately.
Step 3: Understand the Regulatory and Licensing Requirements Early
The next logical step is a deep dive into regulatory and financial licensing considerations. Each asset class falls under different legal frameworks, depending on the region and international laws. Moreover, brokerage regulation requirements may affect your platform model, reporting and client onboarding. Then there’s KYC/AML regulations that are strictly enforced and may result in complete business stoppage if neglected.
So, it’s unwise to start developing the multi-asset brokerage business model without understanding the limitations. Otherwise, your brokerage might face severe legal consequences down the road. Understanding the trading compliance will let you start things the right way and avoid the constant legal troubles that could potentially sabotage business operations.
Step 4.1: Design the Core Technology Stack
Choosing the right tech stack is the bread and butter of sustainable business growth for multi-asset brokers. The right stack gives you risk mitigation and flexibility to satisfy the changing customer demands.
Execution systems are the first step, supervising order routing and trade execution. Well-functioning systems complete trades quickly and reliably, strengthening your reputation and client trust.
Pricing engines convert market data into tradable prices, directly affecting spreads, slippage, and overall trade risk. Combined with execution systems, strong pricing engines allow traders to execute strategies with minimal losses—a win for both traders and brokers.
CRM tools enable full control of the client lifecycle, covering onboarding, communication, and compliance. They help you understand clients and refine customer-facing strategies.
Back-office solutions are business-focused, supporting reconciliations, margin calculations, settlements, and regulatory processes. With proper back-office software, you maintain financial accuracy and avoid regulatory issues.
Finally, reporting software provides visibility into trading activity, risk exposure, and brokerage performance. A well-configured reporting system enables data-driven decisions with fewer errors.
Each tech stack component requires deep specialization, which is why the dominant strategy in 2026 is acquiring the entire stack as a white-label solution. What does the white-label model look like? Let’s discuss.
Step 4.2 – Acquiring a White-label solution as a Tech Stack
White-label solutions provide a complete trading infrastructure for aspiring brokerage companies. From execution systems and pricing engines to CRM, compliance, and reporting tools, they offer a full ecosystem ready to operate.
Providers like Leverate offer white-label platforms tested in real markets, with fast execution, intuitive back-office tools, and stable software that supports both brokers and clients. This allows brokerage teams to remain lean, reducing the need for large technical staff and lowering early-stage capital requirements, freeing more resources for customer acquisition.
In the current market, the gap between custom-built platforms and high-tier white-label solutions is minimal for small and mid-sized brokerages, making white-label tech stacks a strong business choice in the current market.
Step 5: Set Up Liquidity Across Different Asset Classes
Whether you’ve chosen a white-label or custom tech stack, the next step is taking care of the liquidity. Different asset classes have varying liquidity levels and strengths.
Forex is by far the most stable and abundant in terms of liquidity, while cryptocurrencies are highly fragmented and can experience liquidity droughts. So, crypto markets require several highly trusted liquidity sources to minimise volatility risks to ensure timely trade execution.
CFDs require a multi-asset liquidity access to ensure smooth operations for users. Much like the trading infrastructure, liquidity sources can become a technical ordeal without smart decisions.
It’s essential to adopt liquidity aggregation to access multiple liquidity providers and have the best liquidity choices at your disposal. Smart routing functions of aggregation will allow you to access the correct liquidity pools, helping you avoid failed trade requests.
Moreover, smart routing maintains consistent spreads and reduces slippage, creating a safe environment for trade execution. Exposure control is another vital function for risk control. It allows brokerages to limit exposure in risky moments. If the BTC market becomes volatile, exposure control will limit user positions in this market, allowing you to stay safe from increased market volatility.
That’s why it might be smart for beginner brokerages to seek the help of experienced liquidity providers on the market. With their assistance, it will be much easier to step into the market and gain experience. While their services will increase costs, they will significantly reduce market risks and allow you to jumpstart your brokerage efficiently.
Step 6: Assemble the Right Operational and Technical Team
While white-label solutions and liquidity providers can do much of the heavy lifting for you, assembling a highly specialised team is still vital for your success.
Your core team should include specialists who understand trading markets. It’s crucial to have experts in each asset class to avoid common mistakes related to respective industries. Forex, crypto, indices, commodities and other markets are unique and can’t be understood by the same principles.
Next, it’s important to have experienced compliance specialists who understand local and global laws and regulations. They will help you move freely through the regulatory landscape. Your technical team is just as important as the legal one. Even with white-label solutions at hand, your tech team will monitor your ecosystem health and identify any technology roadblocks in your way.
You also need a financial team in place to handle reporting, accounting and financial analysis. Your financial team will go hand-in-hand with your legal support, creating a rock-solid business foundation.
Finally, customer support is irreplaceable and must be handled perfectly. Customer support quality decides whether your customers quit out of frustration or become loyal lifetime customers.
Now, it’s clear that hiring a large brokerage staff for each competency is not realistic. That’s where digital automations come in, allowing you to minimise routine tasks and handle business strategies with sufficient attention.
Step 7: Launch, Monitor, and Gradually Expand Asset Coverage
Once everything is in place, it’s time to launch the multi-asset brokerage and manage the first wave of early adopters. Data analytics will do the heavy lifting, showing which assets drive consistent activity and which can be deprioritized due to low demand. A controlled launch allows you to validate assumptions before committing additional capital or operational resources.
During these early stages, execution quality must be monitored closely, as delays, requotes, or order failures can quickly undermine trader confidence. Client behavior also provides valuable insight into how traders move between asset classes and where friction exists within the platform.
Liquidity performance is another critical factor, as insufficient depth or poor routing can create bottlenecks that limit trading performance and slow scaling.
Launching with a limited scope is far safer than offering everything at once. It allows brokerages to stabilize operations, refine liquidity arrangements, and resolve bottlenecks before expanding asset coverage. By adding instruments gradually based on real usage data rather than assumptions, brokerages can scale while maintaining execution quality, capital efficiency, and operational reliability.
Step 8: What Multi-Asset Brokerages Must Prepare for Beyond 2026
Looking ahead, multi-asset brokerages will face increasing pressure to operate efficiently, transparently, and consistently across asset classes. Automation will continue expanding, particularly in risk monitoring, reporting, and client management – reducing manual work and limiting operational errors. Brokerages that fail to automate core processes will struggle as trading volumes and regulatory demands grow.
Regulation is also expected to tighten, especially around client protection, reporting standards, and cross-border operations. At the same time, execution standards will rise, with traders expecting tighter spreads, lower slippage, and reliable execution in all market conditions.
These trends reflect a broader fintech shift, where platforms are judged more on stability and performance than marketing features alone.
Final Thoughts: Building for Stability Before Growth
Building a successful multi-asset brokerage is not about launching fast or offering the widest possible asset selection from day one. Long-term success comes from disciplined planning, a well-designed trading platform, robust liquidity management, and a willingness to scale gradually based on real operational data.
Brokerages that prioritise stability, execution quality, and controlled expansion are far better positioned to retain traders, manage risk, and grow sustainably in an increasingly competitive market.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is it better to start with a multi-asset brokerage or a single-asset model?
While single-asset brokerages are simpler to launch, multi-asset models are more resilient. They diversify revenue, increase customer lifetime value, and retain traders who rotate between markets instead of leaving during downturns.
2. How many assets should a new multi-asset brokerage offer at launch?
Most brokerages begin with 20–50 highly liquid instruments to ensure reliable execution, manageable risk, and operational stability before expanding.
3. Why is liquidity management so important in a multi-asset brokerage?
Liquidity varies across forex, CFDs, and crypto markets. Poor liquidity management leads to wider spreads, higher slippage, and failed executions, directly affecting performance and broker risk.
4. What role does risk management play in multi-asset trading?
Risk management systems track exposure, margin usage, and volatility across asset classes in real time, helping control losses and maintain financial stability during market volatility.
5. Why do many new brokerages choose white-label solutions?
White-label solutions enable faster launches using proven infrastructure, reducing technical complexity and upfront costs while allowing teams to focus on operations, liquidity, and client acquisition.
