The bank certainly didn’t play down any suggestion that deals done on dbFX were linked into its highly regarded Autobahn FX platform. In an official press release, Jim Turley, the bank’s then global head of currencies and commodities, said: “When you trade with dbFX, you receive privileged access to the world’s foreign exchange market.”
So it probably comes as a surprise to many of the clients who opened accounts to trade on dbFX that the platform appears, for the time being at least, to be a white-labelled version of FXCM, a platform operated by the privately owned Forex Capital Markets. And while there is no doubt that FXCM has been extremely successful since it was established in 1999 – it claims to have ‘serviced’ over 78,000 clients – you do not have to spend too much time searching on the internet to find that it does not have an entirely whiter-than-white reputation.
One site, www.forexbastards.com, has a page rating the numerous retail FX platforms in existence. “If you have done business with the following forex companies, please submit your forex review as well,” it says.
There are numerous complaints about the way FXCM operates on www.forexbastards.com,