mBank forex exit to halt new positions on October 1

mBank forex exit plans will stop the bank's brokerage arm from accepting new forex and CFD positions from October 1, 2025, the bank has confirmed. Clients will only be able to close existing positions after that date. The unit stopped signing new mForex agreements on September 3.

The bank said the decision reflects a desire to focus on products that help customers build long-term savings and capital. The move leaves Dom Maklerski BOŚ and Alior Bank's brokerage unit as the last traditional Polish houses offering forex and CFDs, according to Polish daily Parkiet.

The exit comes as Poland's CFD market expands. The Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) counted 369,737 active clients trading OTC derivatives through domestic brokerages in 2025, a 50% increase from 246,826 a year earlier. Polish residents accounted for 186,372 of those clients, up 59%. Among European markets compared when the Polish total stood near 175,000 in 2023, only the UK had more active retail traders.

mBank's brokerage joins other bank-affiliated houses that previously dropped forex, including Erste's brokerage, BM PKO BP, BM ING BSK, and Noble Securities, Parkiet reported.

DM BOŚ, the brokerage of Bank Ochrony Środowiska, is staying in the market. 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.

The traditional label excludes the largest player. XTB is a KNF-licensed brokerage house and held 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 accounts, 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.

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.