How to classify and assess risk for financial trading and investment-adjacent merchants

Similar-sounding merchant labels can hide very different risk profiles. A crypto infrastructure provider is not the same as an exchange. A retail funded-trader challenge business is not the same as a genuine proprietary trading firm.

The real underwriting question isn’t what a merchant calls itself, it’s what activity it enables and who touches the money. This guide breaks that question down across online brokers and trading platforms, crypto, prediction markets, binary options, and proprietary trading.

Find out what your merchants are really doing.