Moving a running brokerage from one CRM to another is a months-long project, and it tends to happen at the worst time: when the business has grown enough that the old system hurts, but not so much that anyone has spare hours for a migration. Most of those moves trace back to questions nobody asked on the first vendor call. These are the seven that come up when brokers explain, afterwards, why they switched.
The cost of a switch is rarely the licence fee. It is the retraining of a sales floor that has memorised one set of screens, the IBs who notice their commission statement looks different and assume it is wrong, and the weeks when two systems hold two versions of the truth. Asking better questions up front is cheaper than any of that.
1. How do you connect to my trading server, and who maintains the connector?
The answer should name a specific integration method for the platform you run, whether that is MT4, MT5, cTrader or something else, and say who fixes it when the platform vendor ships an update. A provider that maintains the connector as part of the subscription is a different deal from one that bills every fix as custom work. Ask for a demo against a live or staging server, not screenshots.
Integration means more than a balance sync. The CRM should create the trading account itself when a client is approved, change its group when a manager decides, pull trade history for reports, and reflect a deposit on the platform within seconds of the PSP confirming it. Ask to see each of those happen. A connector that reads balances once an hour leaves the sales team working from yesterday’s numbers.
2. What does the migration from my current system involve?
Client records are the easy part. The hard parts are KYC documents with their approval history, the IB tree with its commission settings, and past commission statements that partners will ask about later. Ask which of these the provider has migrated before, in what format they take the data, and how long the parallel run lasts. If the answer is “send us a CSV”, plan on rebuilding the IB tree by hand.
A sensible migration runs both systems side by side for a few weeks, with new registrations landing in the new CRM and existing clients moved in batches by country or by IB. During that period somebody has to check that commission calculations match on a sample of partners, because that is where a silent mistake costs real money. Ask whether the provider has a migration team or hands you an import tool and a support email.
3. Is there an API my own developers can use?
Every broker eventually needs something the CRM does not do out of the box: a landing page that registers clients directly, a connection to a marketing tool, an internal dashboard for the owners. Ask whether the API is documented, whether your team can get keys without going through sales, and whether there is a charge per request. A CRM without a usable API becomes the thing every other project waits on.
4. How deep does the IB structure go, and how is commission calculated?
Ask for the number of levels (some providers cap it, some do not), the commission bases on offer (cash per lot, pips, a percentage of spread, deposit or profit), and whether different bases can apply at different levels of the same tree. Then ask what the IB sees in their own portal and how often it updates. Partners judge a broker by how quickly they can see their own earnings, and a monthly PDF does not count.
Ask about the payout side as well: how often commissions are calculated, whether a manager approves them before they are paid, and what happens when a deposit is charged back after the IB has already been paid on it. Partner networks grow fast and disputes grow with them. A system that can show an IB exactly which trades produced which commission settles most of those disputes in one email.
5. Can one installation run several brands?
Brokers add brands for a new region, a new licence or a different product mix. Ask whether the system keeps clients, staff, reports and email templates separate per brand, and whether the provider charges per brand or per installation. A second brand should take configuration, not a second contract.
Separate entities also need separate reporting. If each brand is licensed by a different regulator, you will be filing different reports to different people, and a combined figure is useless to both. Check that reports run per entity with their own date ranges and currencies, and that staff from one brand cannot see clients of another unless management decides they should.
6. How long have you been doing this, and who answers at night?
Brokerage technology is a small field with a lot of vendors that do not last. Ask how many years the provider has been building for brokers, how many brokers run on the current version, and what the support arrangement is during market hours, which for forex means around the clock on weekdays. A forex CRM provider that has been through a few market cycles will have heard every question on this list before and will have answers written down. A newer one will be working them out on your account.
Put the answers into the contract. The response time for a critical ticket, the right to a full data export at any time and on termination, and the notice period before a price change are the clauses brokers most often wish they had asked for. A provider that resists any of them is telling you something about the next renewal.
7. What is on the roadmap, and who sets it?
Ask what shipped in the last year and what is planned for the next one. Then ask how feature requests get prioritised: by the largest client, by a vote, or by the vendor’s own plan. The answer tells you whether your request for a new PSP integration will take a quarter or a year, and whether the product is still being built or only maintained.
The short version for the next vendor call
- A live connector demo on your platform, and a name for who maintains it
- A migration plan that covers KYC history and the IB tree, with a parallel run
- A documented API with keys your team can get on its own
- IB levels, commission bases, and what the partner sees in their portal
- Several brands on one installation, priced as configuration
- Years in the market, brokers on the current version, support hours in writing
- Last year’s releases and next year’s plan
A provider that answers all seven without hedging is not necessarily the right one, but a provider that cannot answer two or three of them is almost certainly the one you will be migrating away from in a couple of years.
