Our platform is designed for broker-dealers looking to embed brokerage offerings directly into their products, providing their clients with seamless access to US markets. We support fully disclosed accounts to ensure direct transparency and regulatory compliance.

Broker Dealer

Fully-Disclosed

You are a registered broker-dealer in your jurisdiction and you introduce your customers to Alpaca to establish individual accounts on a fully-disclosed basis. Alpaca receives each customer’s information in order to open an account and provide our services.

Depending on your registration status and regulations in your jurisdiction, you may own the full end-to-end user experience from account opening, to trading, and reporting. You are responsible for maintaining a robust Customer Identification Program (CIP) and Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures, in accordance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations. To ensure compliance with applicable laws, Alpaca will conduct due diligence on your firm, including a thorough review of your CIP/KYC/AML program.

In this setup, you will use most of the API methods such as the Account, Transfer and Trading API. In addition, you can move cash and securities between your firm account and end-customer accounts using the Journal API to implement features such as reward programs.

Omnibus

You are a registered broker-dealer and you manage customer accounting and one main trading account for the entire trading flow of your customers. In the omnibus setup, your end customer information (e.g. name, address) is not disclosed to Alpaca.

When submitting customer orders for your two trading accounts, you will indicate if the order is for the long or short position of each customer. To meet our regulatory requirements, you will be required to submit a “sub-tag” in each order to identify different customer’s order flow. This can be just an arbitrary text string such as UUID or a customer ID number. Alpaca, as well as our trading execution venues, need to be able to review and account for all trading activity. Failure to submit the required trading order flow information may result in the suspension of the entire order flow.

As each end customer is not disclosed to Alpaca, you are responsible for all tax reporting in your local jurisdiction. If you are a non-US broker-dealer, this will likely require registration with the IRS as a Foreign Financial Institution (FFI) and get certified as a Qualified Intermediary (QI) to be certified to manage taxes on the US-sourced income by foreigners.