Saxo Review: Is a Bank-Owned Broker Worth It for Forex Traders?
Saxo Bank holds a real banking licence and pays for it with wider forex spreads than pure-play brokers charge. We tested SaxoTraderGO and SaxoTraderPRO to see whether the safety premium is worth paying.
Best for: Multi-asset traders who want forex plus stocks and bonds under one regulated bank
Saxo suits a trader who wants forex alongside stocks, bonds and options at a broker that is actually a licensed bank, and who is willing to pay a wider spread for that safety and range. It does not suit a pure forex scalper on a small account, since Classic-tier spreads are not competitive with dedicated forex brokers until the balance is large enough to reach Platinum.
Price No minimum deposit on Classic, varies by countryMaker Saxo Bankhome.saxo
Saxo Bank does not market itself like a forex broker. It leads with the fact that it holds a banking licence, protects deposits through the Danish Guarantee Fund, and serves over 1.5 million clients across stocks, bonds, options and forex from one account. We opened a Classic account, funded it, and spent a week comparing its forex pricing and platforms against the dedicated forex brokers we usually test, to see whether the bank-owned model is worth the tradeoff.
The banking licence is real, and so is the wider spread
Saxo's own pricing page lists a minimum EUR/USD spread of 1.0 pip on Classic, tightening to 0.9 on Platinum and 0.8 on VIP. Our fills through the week landed close to that Classic figure during normal hours, occasionally wider around news releases. That is noticeably looser than the sub-pip pricing raw-spread brokers advertise, and it is the direct cost of Saxo running as a licensed bank rather than a pure execution venue. Independent trackers describe the jump to Platinum as requiring a substantially larger account than most retail traders start with, so the tighter pricing is not something a $2,000 account will reach quickly.
SaxoTraderGO for daily use, SaxoTraderPRO for six screens
Most of our trading happened on SaxoTraderGO, the browser and mobile platform, which handled order entry, charting and account monitoring without needing a download. For a session where we wanted to watch forex, an index CFD and a bond position at once, we switched to SaxoTraderPRO, the desktop application that spreads across up to six monitors. PRO adds a level 2 order book and algo order types that GO does not expose, and we found it noticeably better suited to anyone actively managing more than one asset class at a time. The tradeoff is that PRO only installs on Windows or Mac, with no equivalent in a browser tab. Setting PRO up the first time took longer than any browser platform we have tested this year, mostly because arranging six windows sensibly is a one-off task worth doing properly rather than something to rush through between trades.
