mBank's brokerage arm will stop letting clients open new forex and CFD positions on October 1. That leaves Dom Maklerski BOŚ and Alior Bank's brokerage unit as the last traditional Polish houses offering the product, Polish daily Parkiet reported.

The exit comes as the market grows. The Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) counted 369,737 active clients trading OTC derivatives through domestic brokerages in 2025, a 50% rise from 246,826 a year earlier.

Polish residents made up 186,372 of those clients, up 59%. Among the European markets compared when the Polish total stood near 175,000 in 2023, only the UK had more active retail traders.

The Bank Brokers That Walked Away

mBank stopped signing new mForex agreements on September 3. From October 1, clients can only close existing positions. The bank said it wants to focus on products that help customers build savings and capital for the long term.

The unit joins bank-affiliated houses that dropped forex earlier, including Erste's brokerage, BM PKO BP and BM ING BSK, along with Noble Securities, according to Parkiet.

mBank's brokerage has also changed at the top. Maksymilian Skolik, who ran it for seven years, left at the end of June and is set to lead BM Pekao, the newspaper reported.

DM BOŚ, the brokerage of Bank Ochrony Środowiska, is staying. It has added MetaTrader 5, widened its crypto CFD range and expanded leveraged trading in Polish shares, including short selling, according to Sebastian Zadora, director of its financial instruments sales department.

Zadora told Parkiet that CFDs are "a profitable business and a segment we definitely want to keep developing."

BM Alior Banku declined to comment on the future of its forex offering, the newspaper said.

XTB Is a Brokerage House Too

The traditional label leaves out the largest player. XTB is a KNF-licensed brokerage house, and it ran 1.235 million of the 3.03 million securities accounts on the Polish market at the end of August, according to Central Securities Depository of Poland (KDPW) data cited by Parkiet.

XTB added 53,600 accounts in August, out of 61,500 for the whole market. mBank's brokerage, second with nearly 577,000, added about 5,500. XTB's monthly intake had slipped to 48,226 in May.

Most of those clients do not start with CFDs. Only 7% of XTB's new clients in 2025 made a CFD their first trade, yet the instruments generate about 95% of revenue, Chief Executive Omar Arnaout said in February.

Jakub Paturalski, managing director of XTB Polska, told Parkiet he expects wider interest in financial markets to bring in investors who want to trade part of their capital more actively.

"In our view, the Polish forex market still has room to grow," he said.

Paturalski also called for more consistent interpretation and enforcement of the rules, so that Polish firms paying taxes at home compete with foreign providers on product and technology, not on differences between supervisors.

He did not name any rival. Revolut serves Polish investors under a Lithuanian license and sits outside the KDPW count.

Trade Republic entered Poland on a single German license in September 2025.

Cross-Selling Moves Into Focus

Aggressive telemarketing was the industry's problem a few years ago, Zadora said. The bigger risk now is selling CFDs to clients who came for ETFs or IKE and IKZE retirement accounts to build long-term savings.

If brokers do not keep CFDs clearly separate from simple investment products, the industry may itself prompt tighter regulation, he said.

In March, the KNF fined XTB 20 million zlotys. Among its findings, the regulator said XTB treated experience with simple instruments as enough to assess clients for CFDs between January 2022 and September 2023.

Registered account totals also overstate activity. Warsaw Stock Exchange data show 444,100 accounts made at least one trade in the first half of 2026, about double the level three years earlier, according to Parkiet.

On the CFD side, 72.2% of active clients closed 2025 with a loss, within the 70.6% to 79.1% range the KNF has recorded since 2021. Their combined losses of 2.68 billion zlotys were nearly four times what winning clients made.

This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.

Source: Finance Magnates