When it comes to making your brokerage stand out from the rest of the brokers, it is vital to pay attention to the design of your trading accounts. A proper setup of your accounts will make it easier for the client to convert and start trading, and will also assist in letting experienced traders to move into your brokerage.

As a broker, you do want your traders to be able to easily navigate within your offer. This is why you can hardly see a broker that offers 4 or more accounts in the same time. Also quite some brokers don’t want to show a “one-size-fits-all” type of an attitude, this is why they find account customisation options quite important.

In this article we are going to take a look at the current practices that exist in the retail FX sector and then we will provide some tips for designing a proper selection of the accounts for your brokerage.

Current status

At the moment there is no generally accepted rule about offering accounts at a certain brokers, although there is a general tendency. Nowadays broker seem to shrink the amount of accounts they offer, hence it is quite possible to see only one option available with some of the brokers. One of such brokers could be, for example, Plus500. It is a broker that focuses on the trading itself while treating each of the clients in the same way, no matter whether his deposit is $200 or $200,000.

Next to this, it seems that quite a few brokers tend to break down their accounts depending on the trading platforms that are available. This happens mostly due to the technical restrictions. For example, a large amount of brokers would offer a separate trading accounts for its MetaTrader 5 and / or cTrader clients.

It is also a common practice to break down the accounts from the level of the required experience. For example, trading accounts at Admiral Markets are offered in 2 forms, basic account that is easily accessible and professional account that is available from the deposit of 3000 USD or more.

In the past it was quite common for the brokers to offer various VIP accounts that were coming with a significant number of perks. Such advantages could include a dedicated 24/7 support number, premium analytics, trading signals and so on. This practice becomes less and less relevant nowadays.

How to design your accounts?

In simple words, there is no direct tip here. As a broker, you should have a clear picture of what type(s) of traders are looking to receive services from you. If you don’t know where to begin, preview your statistics first. Estimate the trading volumes, check the most popular trading instruments, assess the first average deposit and so on.

If you are mostly looking for the beginners in trading, it is the best to actually provide either 2 types of accounts, the one that is easily accessible for the starters and does not result in the vast complexity, while also showing that you are a proper place for the traders to stay once they get more advanced.

Should you look mostly for experienced traders, I would suggest focusing on developing only 1 account type. This way the traders would only need to choose your as a broker without thinking much of an account they suppose to go for.

Splitting the accounts amongst the platforms is quite a bad practice and I would recommend every broker to avoid it. This is simply inconvenient for the trader.

Even though VIP accounts are becoming less common nowadays, it is still a good practice in some countries. I would assume that mostly traders from Russian, CIS and CEE would appreciate being treated in a special way, and perhaps those are the geographies where your brokerage could get an edge over the competition by offer some sort of the special treatment.