Most brokers treat the IB program as a page on the website. Publish the commission table, add a signup form, wait. A few partners register, two of them send clients, and the rest never log in a second time.
Partner acquisition works the way client acquisition works. You have to know who you are looking for, reach them where they already spend their time, and give them a reason to move an audience they built themselves to your brand instead of the broker they already work with. The commission rate matters. It is almost never the thing that decides it.
This article covers the recruiting side of a partner program. If you need the definitions first, start with what an IB is and how the relationship works. If you want the back office view, the tracking, tiers and payout mechanics are covered separately.
Five kinds of people who sign up as IBs
“IB” covers very different businesses, and each one responds to a different pitch. Sorting your prospects into groups before you start outreach saves a lot of wasted messages.
The community owner. Runs a Telegram channel, a Discord server, a YouTube channel, or a signals group. Has an audience that already trades and already trusts the recommendation. Cares most about how fast commission shows up and whether the reporting is something they can check themselves at two in the morning.
The regional agent. Operates in one country, often speaks to clients on WhatsApp in the local language, and handles onboarding by hand. Brings volume that no ad campaign would reach. Cares about local payment methods, local language support, and whether you will pay in a currency that is useful to them.
The educator. Sells courses, runs webinars, or teaches in a classroom. Their students open accounts as part of the curriculum. Cares about account types suitable for beginners, which usually means cent accounts, and about materials they can put in front of students without rewriting them.
The affiliate marketer. Buys traffic, builds landing pages, tracks everything to two decimal places. Will test you against three other brokers at the same time and move budget to whoever converts. Cares about link tracking accuracy, cookie handling, and getting paid on schedule without asking.
Your own client who started referring friends. The cheapest partner you will ever get, and the one most brokers ignore. They are already in your CRM, already funded, and already talking about you. All they need is a link and a reason.
The first four need outreach. The fifth needs a button in the trader’s room and an email.
Where these people already are
Nobody sits down and searches for “forex IB program” unless they have already decided to become an IB. Recruiting works better when you go to the places where the audience already exists.
Telegram and YouTube are where most community owners operate, and reaching them is a direct-message problem, not an advertising problem. We wrote about the mechanics of organic reach on Reddit and Telegram separately, and the same channel research works for partner sourcing. Find channels in the languages and regions you want to grow, look at which brokers they currently mention, and approach the ones whose audience does not match their current broker’s account offering.
Regional expos still work for agent recruitment, better than they work for client acquisition. The people walking the floor at a Dubai or Bangkok event are mostly looking for a broker to represent.
Affiliate networks and forum communities cover the paid-traffic group. They will ask for your conversion data before they ask about commission.
Your own client base covers the fifth group. Run a report on clients who have referred someone informally, or who trade actively and have been with you more than a year, and send them the partner offer directly.
One thing worth saying plainly: your competitors’ partners are a legitimate source. Partners switch, usually because payouts got slow, reporting got vague, or the broker changed the rates without telling anyone. Those are the three complaints you will hear again and again, and each one is something you can answer.
What a partner checks before signing
An experienced IB is evaluating a business relationship that will hold their income for years. The questions they ask are consistent.
How fast does money move, and do I have to ask for it? Commission that accrues in real time and pays without a support ticket is worth more to a partner than a higher rate that arrives late. This is the single most common reason partners leave a broker.
Can I see my own numbers? Partners want to open a dashboard and see volume, commission, and client activity per referral without emailing anyone. A broker that sends a monthly spreadsheet is telling the partner that the numbers are negotiable.
How deep does the structure go? A partner who plans to recruit sub-partners needs to know whether the system supports it and how far down it pays. Kenmore’s multi-level IB system allows an unlimited number of levels, so a partner building a network is not going to hit a ceiling at tier three and have to renegotiate.
Which account types earn commission? Educators and partners in emerging markets bring clients who start small. If cent accounts do not generate commission, those partners cannot work with you. The system should handle regular and cent accounts on the same rate configuration.
How am I paid? Pips, a percentage of the spread, a percentage of client profit, a percentage of deposits, cash per lot. Different partner types want different models, and a broker that only supports one model will lose the partners it does not fit. How to choose between them is covered in the commission design guide.
What do I get to promote with? This separates a serious program from a link and a logo. More on it below.
The partner offer page
Most broker partner pages are a commission table and a form. That page answers one of the six questions above.
A page that converts partners covers the rest: what the reporting looks like (a screenshot beats a paragraph), how often payouts run, how deep the tier structure goes, which account types qualify, what materials the partner receives, and who they will actually talk to. Name the person or the desk. Partners have been burned by support queues.
Put the commission range on the page, not the exact number. The exact number should come out of a conversation, because the right rate depends on the partner’s volume and the accounts they bring. A published flat rate either overpays your small partners or underpays your large ones.
If you operate in multiple regions, the page needs to exist in the partner’s language. A Vietnamese agent reading an English partner agreement will hesitate, and hesitation is where the recruitment dies. Native multi-language support across the portal matters more on the partner side than the client side, because the partner is making a business commitment, not a deposit.
The application flow
Keep the form short. Name, contact, region, audience size, current broker if any. Everything else belongs in the conversation.
Then respond within a day. Partner applications go stale faster than client registrations, because the partner is usually talking to two or three brokers in the same week.
Approval should include a real conversation before the account goes live. You want to know where the traffic comes from, what the partner promises their audience, and whether anything about the arrangement creates a compliance problem later. This is also the moment to set the rate, which is easier when you can see what the partner is actually bringing.
The first thirty days
The gap between a partner signing and a partner producing is where most programs lose their return. A partner who does not send a client in the first month usually never does.
Three things close that gap.
Give them their materials on day one, already branded, already in their language, with their tracking link embedded. A partner who has to build their own creatives will get to it eventually, which means never.
Walk them through their dashboard on a call. Ten minutes. Show them where commission appears, when it pays, and how to see which client did what. Partners who understand their reporting trust the numbers, and partners who trust the numbers send more clients.
Set a first target together and check in on it. Not a contract clause, just an agreement about what the first month should look like. It gives you a reason to follow up that is not “how’s it going.”
After thirty days you will know whether the partner is real. The ones who produce get more attention, better materials, and a rate conversation. The ones who do not go into a nurture sequence and stop consuming your team’s time.
What quietly kills a partner program
Changing rates without warning. A partner who discovers a rate cut from their dashboard will tell every other partner they know. If rates have to change, tell them first and explain the reason.
Payout delays. Every delay costs trust that takes months to rebuild. If a payout will be late, say so before it is late.
Attribution that partners cannot verify. When a partner believes a client should have been credited to them and cannot check, the relationship is already damaged. Attribution rules need to be written down and visible in the portal.
No contact after onboarding. Partner programs are relationship businesses. The broker who calls twice a year loses to the broker who calls monthly.
A single rate for everyone. Your top partner and your newest partner should not be on the same terms. Tiered rates tied to volume give partners a reason to grow, and give you a reason to talk to them.
Where to start
If you are launching a program, start with the fifth group. Run the report, find the clients who already refer, and convert them first. They will produce faster than any outreach campaign and they will show you what your onboarding is missing before you spend money on it.
If you already have a program with more registered partners than active ones, the problem is usually not recruitment. It is what happens after signup, which is a different piece of work: promo materials and partner enablement.
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