How We Chose Where the Company Trades

I started by comparing trading fees at five venues and stopped after realising three of them could not work for us at all. The thing that made it click was reading a crypto currency exchange with published fees alongside.

The email I sent

Six questions, to all five, in one message.

Do you onboard companies registered in our jurisdiction, and what is the document list and timeline.

Can you settle fiat to a bank account in the company’s registered name.

Which authority authorises you, under which permission, and are client assets segregated.

Do you support multiple users with distinct permissions and withdrawal allowlists with a delay.

Can you provide a sample export covering a real month of activity.

What is the total cost of a specific example trade.

The responses

Two answered all six specifically within two days.

One answered four and invited a call for the rest.

Two did not answer specifically at all.

That sorted the list without any comparison of features.

The question that eliminated the most

Settlement into the company’s registered name.

Two venues could only pay to an account matching a verified individual. That makes them unusable for a company, and it was not stated anywhere on their sites. Funds face the same question with more paperwork, which is where a regulated European crypto platform fits.

The export

I asked for a real month, not a demonstration file.

One produced something that loaded into our accounting software without editing. One produced something missing the euro value of fees, which meant reconstructing them from a block explorer.

That difference is an hour a month against half a day a month, forever.

What we did before committing

Opened an account, deposited a small amount, traded, withdrew to the company account, and exported the records.

The full cycle took a week and told us more than any comparison would have.

It also surfaced that one venue’s first withdrawal took three days for verification, which is fine and worth knowing before it matters.

Where fees came in

Last. The difference between the two finalists was a few basis points.

The difference between a venue that can pay our company and one that cannot is total, and that is the comparison that decided it.

What I would tell another small company

Run it as a supplier selection rather than as a download.

Six questions in one email is twenty minutes and it removes most of the field before you spend an evening on feature tables. If you want to see all of this in a real product rather than in my account of it, a crypto exchange with published fees publishes the terms.