OKX institutional lending (officially called VIP Loan) does not have a "grouping" button. In practice, grouping is done by creating risk units. A risk unit is a collection of accounts. Collateral, borrowing, repayment, and renewal are all calculated together within this unit. The margin rate (MR) is also calculated for the entire unit, not for individual accounts. This means the accounts you put into the same risk unit directly determine how their assets and liabilities support each other.
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Authorization boundaries focus on two roles: the delegate account (Delegate UID) and other sub-accounts in the unit. The delegate account is the only account that can borrow, repay, and renew loans, but it cannot modify the risk unit itself. The master account can create and edit risk units, but it cannot borrow on behalf of the delegate account. This separation of duties is the most important thing to understand when grouping accounts.
Who can join the same risk unit
Regular risk units support limited account types. Standard sub-accounts and MSA (Managed Sub-Accounts) can join, but DMA broker sub-accounts and custodial sub-accounts cannot. Two other exclusion rules often cause issues in practice: an account that has already joined another risk unit cannot join a second one; an account with positions in strategy trading, structured products, or copy trading also cannot join.
After October 2025, another restriction was added: institutional lending users can only add accounts without options positions to a risk unit. Accounts already in a unit will also be restricted from options trading. If your grouping plan includes sub-accounts that trade options, you need to close those options positions first. Otherwise, the account cannot enter the unit.
MSA risk units follow a different logic. They are designed for asset management scenarios. All accounts in the unit must be managed sub-accounts bound to the same trading team. The delegate account must also be one of them. Regular risk units can mix master accounts and standard sub-accounts, but MSA units cannot. MSA units also do not support the "auto-add new sub-accounts" feature.
What to fill in when creating, and what cannot be changed
When creating a regular risk unit, the delegate account UID cannot be changed after creation. Nickname, sub-account list, and email alert settings can be edited later, but once the delegate account is selected, it is locked. This means you need to decide which account will handle borrowing operations before grouping. You cannot change it later.
Sub-accounts can be entered by individual UID or imported in bulk using .xlsx, .xls, or .csv files (maximum 2 MB). The first column should contain sub-account UIDs, excluding the delegate account. Email alerts include the delegate account's bound email by default. It is recommended to also add the email addresses of the team responsible for risk control or finance. MR alerts are only sent to these addresses.
The "auto-add new sub-accounts" feature can only be enabled on one risk unit at a time. If you run multiple risk units in parallel, enabling it on one means other units must manually maintain their sub-account lists. This feature is not available when the delegate account is an MSA.
Authorization boundaries: who can borrow, who can only view
Permissions within a risk unit are divided into three levels. Grouping determines who is in which position and therefore who can operate later:
Master account can create and edit risk units (change sub-accounts, change nickname, manage alerts, toggle auto-add), but cannot perform borrowing operations on behalf of the delegate account. Delegate account can view all unit information and execute borrowing, repayment, and renewal. It is the only account with borrowing operation rights. Other sub-accounts in the unit can only view information, not borrow or repay. Accounts outside the unit cannot see this risk unit at all.
If your organization separates trading teams from finance/risk teams, the delegate account should be given to the team that actually needs to adjust positions or manage liabilities. The master account should stay with the person who controls the account structure. If you give the delegate account to an account that only needs to view information, no one can borrow. If you give the master account to a trader, they might accidentally change the unit composition and affect the margin rate calculation for the entire group.
Risk judgment after grouping
The core risk metric of a risk unit is the margin rate (MR), calculated as the total discounted asset value minus total liabilities, divided by total liabilities. When MR falls below 40%, assets in the unit cannot be withdrawn or transferred out. Below 30%, a margin call is triggered. Below 15%, liquidation is triggered, and assets are used to repay the unit's total liabilities. The point of grouping is this: if you put a high-volatility asset account and a stablecoin account in the same unit, a price drop in the former will drag down the MR of the entire unit, and the latter will passively "support" the former. Conversely, keeping unrelated accounts in separate risk units means a loss in one unit will not drag down another.
A practical judgment: if your sub-accounts have very different trading strategies and mismatched asset volatility, creating separate risk units is safer than merging them. The benefit of merging is higher collateral utilization. The downside is that any problem in one account will spread to the entire group. OKX allows you to create multiple risk units for different loan orders. Using this for isolation is more controllable than putting all accounts into one unit.
After creation, you can view the current MR estimate at the risk unit entry. The MR shown on the edit page is an estimate based on the selected accounts, not a real-time value. The actual MR changes with market fluctuations. Checking the actual MR on the VIP Loan page or the risk unit entry is more reliable than relying on the estimate from the edit page.
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