Onboarding Friction for High-Volume FX/Crypto — Anyone Found a Seamless Solution?
Hey everyone, been a long-time lurker, first-time poster in this room. We're scaling up a quant strategy that involves pretty significant volume in both spot FX ($EURUSD, $GBPUSD primarily) and a handful of major cryptos ($BTC, $ETH). Our current setup with a Tier 2 broker for FX and a separate crypto exchange is starting to show its age, mostly around onboarding new funds and entities. The KYC/KYB process, especially when dealing with nested corporate structures and multiple UBOs, is consistently a several-week ordeal, even with 'dedicated' account managers.
It feels like we're constantly re-proving the same points, submitting the same documents, just to activate new trading accounts or increase limits. It's not just the time sink, but the opportunity cost when markets are moving. We've explored a few prime brokerage solutions, but they seem heavily geared towards traditional assets and the crypto side is either an afterthought or requires a completely separate setup anyway, negating some of the benefit. Has anyone here found a truly streamlined solution or a provider that genuinely understands and facilitates rapid, yet compliant, onboarding for high-volume, multi-asset strategies? Looking for real-world experiences, not just vendor pitches.
This is a common pain point for sure. Have you looked into any of the institutional-grade prime brokerage solutions that offer both traditional and digital asset custody/execution? It might streamline a lot of those onboarding headaches if you can consolidate.