Broker and Prop Firm Software in Lagos.

The first question a Lagos founder asks is rarely about charts. It is about payouts: how a trader in Lekki gets paid, what the bank will ask, and how the whole trail looks if somebody comes to check it a year later. Everything else on the technology list is easier than that one, and it is the part most platform vendors quietly leave to you.

Who this page is for

People starting or already running a broker or a prop firm with a base in Lagos. Nigeria has produced a very large retail trading audience and a growing set of firms serving it, so we get two profiles: the broker that wants its own terminal and portal rather than an introducing arrangement, and the prop firm selling evaluations to a domestic and pan-African audience. Both operations need a platform, a client system and clean money records. The differences are set out in broker versus prop firm.

The regulatory backdrop in Nigeria

Securities and capital markets activity in Nigeria is supervised by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC. Banking, payment services and foreign exchange sit with the Central Bank of Nigeria. Which of those touches your firm depends on what you actually sell and where the counterparty risk lands, and that is a question for Nigerian counsel. Many firms serving Nigerian clients hold a licence elsewhere and market inward, which brings its own trade-offs. Offshore broker licences and licence costs compared lay out what changes when you pick one route over another.

Prop firms sit in a less settled position almost everywhere, not only here. Prop firm regulation describes how supervisors have been treating evaluation models. Read it as background, not as a ruling on your business.

What you get

The eTrader platform with its own market data feed, on web and native apps, carrying your brand and your instrument list. The Broker CRM for client records, KYC state, deposits, withdrawals, markups, swaps and reporting. The Prop Firm CRM for challenge design, rule evaluation, breach handling and the payout queue. All of it is fully managed: our servers, our engineers, our monitoring. Once your own licensing and paperwork are in place, a firm can be live in 24 hours.

The payout queue matters more in this market than founders expect. A prop firm that pays by hand from a bank app will not survive its own growth, and the first missed or duplicated payment costs more in community reputation than a month of advertising buys back.

Payments and banking

Nigeria has one of the more advanced domestic payment stacks on the continent and one of the harder cross-border stories. Local rails move naira quickly. Getting value out of the country, settling with a liquidity provider abroad and paying a trader in another currency is where the friction lives. Card acquiring for trading is treated as high risk, which is the subject of high risk merchant accounts, and a large share of Nigerian clients prefer stablecoins, covered in crypto payments for trading firms and the TRC20 versus ERC20 question. Which network you accept changes your fees and your reconciliation load.

Whatever mix you settle on, the CRM records it: the rail, the reference, the rate, the fee and who approved the release. That record is what a bank asks for, and it is what an auditor asks for.

Language, hours and firm structure

Lagos works in English, which removes a problem most regions have, though Pidgin in support chat and voice notes on WhatsApp are the register your clients actually use. Nigeria sits at UTC+1 year round, so the London open lands mid-morning and the New York session covers your afternoon and early evening. That is a comfortable desk day and it is one reason firms here run genuine support hours rather than a ticket queue.

Most Nigerian groups we speak to split marketing from operations, lean heavily on affiliate and community acquisition, and buy technology rather than hire a platform team. Firms weighing the region against neighbours usually look at Nairobi and Cairo too, and every market we serve is listed on the locations page.

Who builds it

Alex Onta built eTrader, with Roman Onta helping on the design, and Alex leads the platform. Alex Onta and Roman Onta built the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals together, and they carry compliance, payments and corporate structuring together as well. You will speak to one of them directly.

Start here

Book a call with your challenge rules or your instrument list in hand, or text us if that is quicker. We will tell you what fits, what does not, and what the first week looks like.

Where SINGUARD is based, and where we meet firms in Lagos

All of the software, the contracts and the policies come from SGHK Softwares Limited in Hong Kong, the holding company that builds and licenses eTrader and both CRMs. The team works out of Dubai, where both Executive Directors, Alex Onta and Roman Onta, live for most of the year, and our licensed UAE entity is SINGUARD GLOBAL FZC in Ajman Free Zone. We hold no office or licence in Nigeria, and none is needed: the platform is delivered and managed from our own clustered servers, so a firm in Lagos runs exactly what a firm anywhere else runs, and your licence, your client money and your compliance obligations stay entirely with your own entity.

Being in Dubai keeps the team on the industry circuit and within easy reach of Lagos for calls and meetings, in a time zone that overlaps most of the trading world.

In person, the place to find us is the industry circuit. The team attends Forex Expo Dubai and the other major shows, wearing the SINGUARD and eTrader shirts, and you can walk up without an appointment, ask for a live demo of the terminal and both CRMs, and talk to the Executive Directors directly in English, Italian, Romanian or Russian. See where to find us at the expo.

Frequently Asked Questions

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