Licences at eight brokers: the full comparison

A licence determines how much protection you have in a dispute, and it is the most easily verified thing about
a broker — yet it is rarely set out side by side. This table lists every licence the eight brokers publish, with
the numbers so you can check them yourself.

Licences at eight brokers

Source: licence information published on each broker’s site. A blank means the broker
does not state a licence number publicly — not that it has no licence.

The key point: which licence applies to you

A brokerage group usually has several legal entities, each with its own licence:

• The UK entity serves UK clients, under FCA supervision.
• The Australian entity serves Australian clients, under ASIC.
• The offshore entity serves international clients.

Clients in Vietnam are almost always in the third group. Which means the FCA or ASIC licence
displayed on the home page may not apply to your account at all.

How to find out: open the client agreement and look for the entity name and place of registration in the
opening section. That is the party you are contracting with.

The regulators in this table, by strictness

• FCA (UK) — high capital requirements,
  segregated client money, a compensation scheme, and retail
  leverage limits.
• ASIC (Australia) — strict capital and audit requirements and segregated client money, but
  no compensation scheme equivalent to the FCA’s.
• CySEC (Cyprus) — within the common European framework, with a capped compensation
  scheme.
• DFSA (UAE), FSCA (South Africa) — substantive supervision, regional in scope.
• FSA (Seychelles), VFSC (Vanuatu), FSC (Belize) — the offshore group: low capital
  requirements, usually no compensation scheme, and limited enforcement capacity.

The number of licences is not a quality score

A broker with five licences is no safer than one with two, if the licence that applies to you is an offshore
one in both cases. The last column is information, not a score.

How to verify it yourself in ten minutes

1. Take the licence number from the table above.
2. Go to the relevant regulator’s website and use its
   public register.
3. Cross-check: does the entity name match your agreement, is the licence still valid, and what services does it
   permit?

The last step matters most. There are cases where the licence number is real but belongs to a different entity
in the same group.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Conditions and fee levels are published by the brokers and can change at any time — check with the broker you actually use. Leveraged forex and CFD trading carries a high level of risk and can cost you your entire deposit.