Outsourced Dealing Desk vs In-House: The Full Cost Comparison for Brokers

Every broker that grows past its first few thousand accounts hits the same question: build a dealing desk in-house, or outsource it. The marketing on both sides is predictable, so this article does something more useful: it lays out what each model actually costs, where the hidden line items sit, and which model fits which stage of a brokerage. The numbers below are illustrative ranges based on what we see across engagements; your jurisdiction and book will move them, but the structure of the comparison holds.

What a dealing desk actually has to cover

Before comparing costs, it is worth being precise about the job. A dealing desk for an FX or CFD broker is responsible for, at minimum: monitoring net and gross exposure by symbol, group and book in real time; making and documenting A-book, B-book and hybrid routing decisions; watching margin utilisation and stop-out proximity across the account base; covering news and event windows and rollover; spotting toxic flow, meaning latency-sensitive entries, coordinated accounts and one-sided volume bursts, before it compounds; and keeping the platform itself healthy: group settings, symbol configuration, session schedules and bridge routing.

The critical word in that list is continuous. Markets run 24 hours, five days a week. Exposure does not wait for your office hours, and the most expensive incidents cluster around exactly the windows a small team is least likely to be watching: Asian session, macro releases, rollover, and Sunday opens.

The real cost of an in-house desk

The headline cost is salaries, but it is rarely the whole picture. Genuine 24/5 coverage requires a minimum of four to five trained dealers once you account for shifts, weekends off, holidays and sick leave. A three-person desk on paper is a two-person desk in practice for most of the year.

Salaries. A competent dealer with live desk experience costs roughly EUR 35,000 to EUR 60,000 per year in Cyprus and comparable hubs, and materially more in London or Dubai. A head of dealing or senior risk manager to lead the desk adds EUR 70,000 to EUR 120,000. A realistic fully-staffed 24/5 desk therefore starts around EUR 200,000 to EUR 350,000 per year in payroll alone before employer contributions.

Recruitment and training. Experienced dealers are scarce, and every departure costs you a recruitment fee, a notice-period gap in the roster, and months of onboarding before the new hire can be trusted alone on a night shift. Firms routinely underestimate this line because it arrives irregularly, but it arrives.

Tooling. MT5 and MT4 manager terminals show raw data; they do not aggregate exposure across servers, score toxic flow, or link coordinated accounts. Desks either buy third-party risk software, typically EUR 1,000 to EUR 5,000+ per month depending on scope, or live with blind spots.

Management overhead. Someone senior has to write the procedures, review the routing decisions, audit the desk's own performance and keep the risk policy current. That time is a real cost even when it never appears as a budget line.

Key-person risk. The most underpriced item of all. If your night-shift dealer resigns, your coverage has a hole next Monday. If your head of dealing leaves, the institutional knowledge of how your book is actually run may leave with them.

A fair all-in estimate for a properly staffed, properly tooled in-house 24/5 desk lands between EUR 300,000 and EUR 500,000+ per year for a small-to-mid-sized broker, and it does not scale down. The desk costs roughly the same whether you have 2,000 accounts or 20,000, which is precisely why the model punishes smaller books.

The real cost of an outsourced dealing desk

An outsourced dealing desk converts most of that fixed cost into a monthly retainer, typically priced on scope: number of servers, symbols, account groups and bridge connections monitored, plus the level of 24/5 support required. Depending on the provider and scope, retainers generally run a fraction of the in-house equivalent, commonly 20 to 40 percent of the cost of a comparable internal desk, because the provider's dealers, tooling and management are shared across clients while your data and procedures are not.

The honest accounting also includes what outsourcing costs you beyond the invoice:

Onboarding effort. Procedures, limits and escalation paths have to be documented and agreed in writing before coverage starts. This is work, typically two to three weeks, though most brokers find the documentation exercise valuable in itself, because many desks discover their procedures were living in one person's head.

A boundary to manage. An outsourced desk operates inside a written playbook; discretionary calls outside it get escalated to you. That is a feature for control and auditability, but it means the model suits brokers who want documented, consistent dealing, not brokers who want a desk that improvises.

Provider dependence. You are trusting an external team with an operationally critical function. The mitigations that matter: read-only access only, no custody of client funds ever, per-client data partitioning, a written exit protocol, and daily written reporting so nothing about your own book is opaque to you.

Side-by-side

When in-house is still the right answer

Outsourcing is not universally correct. An internal desk earns its cost when the book is large enough that desk cost is a rounding error against the P&L it protects; when the dealing function is a genuine source of proprietary edge rather than a control function; or when regulatory or group-structure requirements mandate the function sit in-house. Even then, many large desks outsource the overnight and weekend shifts or run an external desk as a second set of eyes. Hybrid models are increasingly the norm rather than the exception.

When outsourcing wins

For most brokers under roughly 50,000 active accounts, and for nearly all prop firms, the arithmetic is one-sided: you get five-dealer coverage, institutional tooling and documented procedures for a fraction of the cost of building it, and you get it in weeks rather than quarters. The pattern we see most often is a broker running one or two dealers on European hours, with the Asian session, news windows and rollover effectively uncovered, which is exactly where the expensive incidents happen. Outsourcing closes that gap immediately without a hiring plan.

Questions to ask any provider before you sign

Whether you talk to us or anyone else, ask these. The answers separate serious operations from resellers:

1. What access do you require, and is it strictly read-only? Any provider requesting write access or anything near client funds should be a hard stop.
2. Are dealing procedures, limits and escalation paths agreed in writing before go-live?
3. What exactly do I receive daily, and can I see a sample dealing report?
4. Which platforms and bridges do you operate natively (MT4, MT5, cTrader; oneZero, PrimeXM, FXCubic, Tools for Brokers, Brokeree)?
5. How is my data partitioned from your other clients?
6. What is the exit protocol, covering credentials, reports and handover, if we part ways?

Frequently asked questions

Deltar runs outsourced dealing desks and risk operations for FX and CFD brokers and prop firms on MT4, MT5 and cTrader, backed by the Verix risk intelligence platform. Start with a Health Check or read more about the outsourced dealing desk service.