A commission per million is one line, and the easiest to check. Before it, here is what tells you whether a liquidity provider can hold your flow and pay you back on the day it is hardest to do.
Choosing a liquidity provider starts before the commission. Check where the provider publishes its capital and whether it is audited, whether your collateral is segregated, how fast it returns your funds, the position limits and margin it will put in writing, and how it executed on a named stress day. Price comes last. The twelve questions below put them in that order.
The number every broker checks first is the commission per million. It arrives in writing, it compares cleanly, and this year it keeps falling. It is also the smallest thing that can go wrong with a liquidity provider, and the easiest to fix if it does. A rate can be renegotiated; funds that have not come back are another matter.
On an average day in April 2025, more than $14 trillion of foreign-exchange obligations came due, and about $1.4 trillion of it settled with no payment-versus-payment protection, fully exposed to the risk that one side pays and the other does not (BIS analysis of the 2025 Triennial Survey, June 2026). Settlement is the hard part of this business, and it is the part a rate card says nothing about.
So the first thing to establish is whether a provider can hold your flow, settle it, and return your money when your clients want theirs. Below are the twelve questions I would put to any liquidity provider, in the order I would ask them. Most name the document or number to ask for.
Capital is the provider's own money, held back to absorb losses. It is what lets it keep quoting and keep paying you when a session runs against its own book. You do not need to read a full set of accounts to judge it. You need three answers.
1. Where does the provider publish its capital, and is it audited? An EU- or UK-regulated investment firm publishes this once a year, in audited accounts or a disclosure document built from them (in the EU, a Pillar III report). A good answer points you to a page you can open today, or to audited accounts the provider will send you. A weak answer is an unaudited number in an email, or no number at all. If a provider cannot show you audited capital, you have your answer without reading a figure.
2. How far above its regulatory minimum is the provider's capital, and how much of it is real equity rather than borrowed money? Every regulated provider has a legal floor it must stay above; for an EU investment firm that deals on its own account, it is €750,000. A good answer is comfortably above the floor, a multiple of it, and made up mostly of paid-in capital, reserves and retained profit, the money that is actually there. Watch for a big headline number propped up by debt, or a firm sitting just over its minimum. Ask for the last two or three years side by side, so you can see whether the capital is growing from profit or being topped up.
3. Is the provider a licensed investment firm? If you are an EU- or UK-regulated broker, this one has a direct cost to you. Under your capital rules, you must hold a reserve against the money you keep on deposit with your provider, in case it fails. If the provider is a licensed investment firm, that reserve is small. If it is not, the same balance forces you to lock up roughly five times as much of your own capital. A good answer is a licence number and the regulator behind it. What counts is the business the provider does: a non-EU provider qualifies if it would count as an investment firm were it based in the EU.
This is the part brokers tend to learn the hard way. A winning week for your clients is a week you owe them withdrawals, and the cash to fund those withdrawals is sitting as realised profit and excess margin in your account with the provider. How fast you can pull it decides whether your own treasury holds.
4. Does the provider keep your collateral in segregated accounts, or take ownership of it outright? Under a title-transfer arrangement the provider takes legal ownership, and if it fails you are an unsecured creditor. Segregated collateral is protected in insolvency, though not returned quickly: Alpari UK's clients waited about 29 months in special administration and recovered roughly 82% of $43.8m in claims. Segregation improves what you get back. It does not decide when.
5. Can the provider re-use the collateral you post, and within what limits? Ask for the rehypothecation and security-interest clauses. Re-used collateral is collateral that has entered someone else's funding chain.
6. How quickly does the provider return realised profit and excess collateral, and is that a written commitment with a stated wire cut-off? Almost no provider publishes a withdrawal or collateral-return service level. Ask for one in writing, name the cut-off time, and note the pause before the answer. Same-day return of seven figures is an operational promise, and it belongs in the agreement.
7. How does the provider fund and settle a position over a weekend or holiday? Ask how a Friday-evening close-out or a bank-holiday event is funded and settled when wires do not move, how long the money waits for the next banking day, and whether a margin call can fall due in that gap. With some markets now trading through the weekend, this gap matters more for brokers that offer them.
Capacity is what a provider can carry when prices move one way, and whether your agreed terms survive the session.
8. What are the provider's default position limits and margin schedule, and do they hold in a gap? Ask for the schedule in writing, by instrument, for weekdays, weekends and event windows, and ask what the provider can change during an event, and with what notice.
9. Can the provider show measured execution on a named stress day? Ask for the fill ratio, the hold time, whether positive slippage is passed on and not only negative, and the average spread at your trade size. A spread quoted "from" is the tightest the provider has ever shown, usually for a split second on a calm day. Ask for a dated average, or a live feed to measure on the next event.
10. Who are the provider's own prime brokers, and how many independent pricing sources back its feed? Many price streams through one provider can still clear through the same place. The concentration sits at the provider's own bank relationships, so ask who they are.
11. What are the provider's events of default, close-out method, margin-call timing and calculation-agent role? These clauses decide what happens to you on the worst day, and they are the ones brokers skip in onboarding.
12. What is the provider's commission per million, per side or per round turn, and what is the all-in cost once spread, slippage and rejected orders are counted? A rate quoted per side doubles across a round turn (open plus close). Ask for a worked total-cost example at your own volume and instrument mix.
A new brokerage with modest, calm-market flow can reasonably run this list from the bottom and take the lowest rate. Once your book carries real risk through events, the list reads top down again, and the top is where the money is won or lost.
For our part: our own-funds ratio at the end of 2025 was 527% of the requirement, held entirely as Common Equity Tier 1 with no borrowings, and the Pillar III disclosures behind that number run back to 2020 on our website. Client money is held in segregated accounts. Both are things you can read before you sign, which is the point of the list.
One morning your clients will be up seven figures and asking to withdraw before your provider has paid you. The agreement you sign now decides what happens next.