Two paths lead into the brokerage business without building your own technology, and they sound almost identical: white label and grey label. Providers use the terms loosely, sometimes interchangeably, and that looseness costs new brokers real money — because the two models differ on the one question that decides whether you are building a business or a referral channel: who owns the client relationship.
This guide draws the line clearly. Definitions first, then a side-by-side comparison, then an honest look at when each model makes sense — including the cases where grey label is genuinely the right call.
What is a grey label brokerage?
A grey label brokerage operates inside another broker’s or provider’s environment under partial branding. You get your name and logo on the client-facing surface — sometimes a sub-domain, sometimes little more than a branded login page — while the master broker or platform provider keeps control of the trading servers, liquidity, back office, and often compliance.
Externally, the brand can look independent. Underneath, it is a sub-account of someone else’s operation. Customization is minimal by design: you take the platform largely as it comes, and your economics are usually a revenue share or markup on the master broker’s terms rather than a business you price yourself.
The appeal is speed and cost. Industry materials typically describe grey labels launching in days to a week, with upfront capital estimates commonly quoted at a fraction of a white label setup. You are, in effect, renting a desk inside a working brokerage.
What is a white label brokerage?
A white label brokerage is a complete, rebrandable stack that you operate as your own business. The technology provider supplies the trading platform, the client portal, the CRM, and the back office; you supply the brand, the licensing, the liquidity relationships, and — critically — the client relationships. Every account opened is opened with you.
The platform carries no trace of the provider on the client side. You configure account types, spreads, payment rails, and onboarding flows, and you see and control the full client lifecycle from lead to withdrawal. That control comes with more responsibility and a higher price than a grey label, but the business you build accrues to your brand, not someone else’s.
The economics of that model versus building from scratch are covered in white label versus building your own trading platform; this article is about the other boundary — white label versus something less than white label.
Side-by-side comparison
| Grey label | White label | |
|---|---|---|
| Branding depth | Partial — your logo on the provider’s environment; the master brand often visible underneath | Full — the entire client-facing stack carries your brand only |
| Client ownership | Clients frequently sit on the master broker’s books; in many arrangements they legally belong to the master broker | Clients are yours — your accounts, your data, your relationship |
| Cost | Lowest upfront; industry estimates commonly put it well below white label setup costs, but revenue shares grow with your volume | Higher setup and recurring fees, but your unit economics improve as you scale |
| Control | Minimal — spreads, instruments, platform roadmap, and often risk settings are set by the master broker | Broad — account types, pricing, payments, KYC flow, and risk configuration are yours |
| Credibility | Limited — sophisticated clients and partners can usually spot a sub-brand, and IBs may hesitate to send flow to one | A branded brokerage with its own infrastructure reads as a real counterparty to clients, IBs, and payment providers |
| Time to launch | Typically days to a week | Days to weeks with a turnkey provider; historically months with assembled stacks |
When a grey label honestly makes sense
It would be convenient for a white-label provider to tell you grey labels are always a mistake. They are not.
Testing a market. If you want to find out whether your audience in a specific region will fund accounts at all, a grey label is a cheap, fast experiment. You learn about demand, deposit behavior, and acquisition costs before committing to licensing and infrastructure.
An IB outgrowing referral links. An introducing broker with a loyal book sometimes wants a branded front end before they are ready to run a brokerage. A grey label is a middle step — though a structured IB program under an established broker often achieves the same thing with less ambiguity about who is responsible for what.
No appetite for operations. If you genuinely never want to touch compliance workflows, payment operations, or risk management, a grey label keeps all of that on the master broker’s desk. You are choosing to be a marketing partner, and that is a legitimate business — as long as you know that is what you chose.
The common thread: grey label works when the arrangement is temporary or deliberately limited. The trouble starts when a temporary arrangement becomes the permanent structure of a growing business.
The risks of grey label
You may not own your clients. This is the risk that outweighs everything else. In many grey label arrangements the accounts sit on the master broker’s books, and the client agreement is between the trader and the master broker — not you. If the relationship ends, the clients you spent your marketing budget acquiring may not be yours to take anywhere. Read the agreement’s data-portability and client-ownership clauses before you sign, not after.
Dependency compounds as you grow. The master broker sets the spreads, decides the platform roadmap, controls uptime, and can change commercial terms. Every new market, instrument class, or feature your clients ask for is a negotiation with someone whose incentives are not identical to yours. Migration later means re-papering clients onto a new entity — the hardest kind of migration there is.
The cheap model gets expensive at scale. Grey labels are usually priced as a share of revenue. Industry materials commonly describe shares that can reach a large fraction of spread income, which is trivial when your volumes are small and painful when they are not. Operators who scale past modest monthly revenue typically end up paying more under a grey label than a white label license would have cost — while owning less.
Credibility has a ceiling. Payment providers, liquidity partners, and serious IBs do due diligence. A sub-brand of someone else’s brokerage is a weaker counterparty in every one of those conversations.
How a full white label works in practice
A modern white label launch is a configuration project, not an engineering one. Altrogi’s version of it runs in four steps: book a demo, configure your branding, account types, payments, and KYC, connect your trading platform and providers, and go live — a sequence measured in days, not months. The full picture of what’s included is on the white label brokerage platform overview, and the technical detail lives at docs.altrogi.com.
What you actually operate is the complete surface a grey label never gives you:
- AltTrade — the browser-based trading terminal your clients use, installable as a PWA, with pro charting, one-click execution, copy trading with allocation models and stop-loss protection, and built-in algorithmic bots (Grid, Martingale, Reverse Martingale).
- AltCore — the client portal: multi-wallets across fiat and crypto, 9+ payment rails, and built-in KYC with switchable providers, so onboarding and money movement run under your brand and your rules.
- AltCRM — the back office a grey label operator never sees: sales floor, lead funnels with scoring and auto-assignment, maker-checker financial approvals, risk surveillance, and 14+ built-in reports with audit trails.
On the trading side, you choose the engine rather than inherit one: MetaTrader 5 and Match-Trader connect through platform gateways, and Altrogi’s own native engine carries no third-party dealing-server license cost. All three account types run side by side under one brand. One honest caveat, in the spirit of our MetaTrader comparison: MQL4/MQL5 expert advisors do not run on AltTrade — if your clients depend on them, route those clients to MT5 accounts through the gateway.
And if your ambition is the opposite of a grey label — running multiple brands rather than sub-branding under someone else’s — AltOps manages multi-brand operation from a single install, with runtime theming, tenant provisioning, and encrypted integration credentials per brand.
The real question is what you’re building
Strip away the terminology and the choice is simple. A grey label rents you a brand position inside someone else’s brokerage: fast, cheap, and honest work if you treat it as a test or a stepping stone. A white label makes you the brokerage: more cost, more responsibility, and full ownership of the clients, the data, and the upside.
If you are testing a market, test it cheaply and deliberately — with an exit plan and a contract you have actually read. If you are building a business you intend to keep, own the client relationship from day one. It is the one asset in this industry you cannot rent.
Ready to see the white label side in practice? Book a demo and walk through the four steps on your own branding.