OANDA review

The FCA register does not show this firm as Authorised. It shows 'See full details', which is a composite status, and the reason turns out to be a cancelled payment-institution authorisation sitting beside a live investment one. The distinction is invisible unless you open the record.

Last verified 25 August 2026 · how we check

Most firms in this series return a one-word status on the FCA register: Authorised, or No longer authorised. This one returns three words that mean neither.

What the registers return

Companies House number 07110087.

What “See full details” actually means

It is not a warning and it is not a downgrade. It is what the register displays when a firm holds more than one kind of authorisation and they are not all in the same state.

Here the record carries two. The investment permissions are live, including safeguarding and administration of assets with Retail (Investment) named as a customer type. The payment-services authorisation is marked

Cancelled — Authorised PI

with a PSD effective date of 4 July 2018. So the firm gave up, or lost, its standing as an authorised payment institution, and kept its investment permissions.

For a trading account, the investment permissions are the ones that matter. The payment authorisation governs a different activity, and its cancellation does not remove the protections attached to the brokerage.

None of that is visible from the status line. A reader who checks the register, sees something other than “Authorised”, and stops there will draw the wrong conclusion in one direction; a reader who sees the word “cancelled” anywhere and panics will draw it in the other.

<text x="404" y="110" fill="#e00025">Cancelled — Authorised PI</text>
<text x="404" y="132" fill="#767676">PSD effective 04/07/2018</text>
<text x="404" y="152" fill="#767676">a different activity</text>

The third way a register check goes wrong

This is the third distinct failure we have now documented, and together they cover most of what goes wrong when someone is told to “just check the regulator”.

A fourth sits alongside them and is the most consequential: a licence that exists but does not cover retail clients, as at Exness (UK) Ltd, where all five permissions name Professional and Eligible Counterparty and none names retail.

In every case the fix is the same and takes a minute: open the record rather than reading the summary line.

The previous trading name

The register lists FXTrade as a previous trading name, effective to 23 March 2021.

Trading names are ordinary and change often. This one matters because a search for material about the firm will surface both names, and because a licence effective from 2011 sitting under a name adopted in 2021 is another instance of the point we made at ThinkMarkets: the age attached to a licence is not automatically the age of the brand you are looking at.

Australia covers retail explicitly

AFSL 412981, licensed 26 March 2012, authorises issuing and dealing in derivatives and foreign exchange contracts and making a market in both, closing with the phrase we check every time:

to retail and wholesale clients

Nothing appears in the CySEC register, so an EU client is not being served by a Cypriot entity of this group and the Investor Compensation Fund does not reach them through that route.

Which register fields actually discriminate

Reading records for eleven firms produced a finding about the register itself, and the useful half of it is negative.

We checked the client money permission on ten UK-authorised brokers in this series, expecting it to separate them. It does not:

Ten out of ten, identical. The field is a condition of doing this business at all, so it tells you nothing about the difference between one authorised broker and another. We are publishing that because a field which looks like a safety signal and is actually universal is worth knowing about before someone builds a comparison on it.

The fields that do discriminate, on the evidence of these eleven records, are four: customer type on each permission, the status line and what sits under it, the warning list, and the effective dates. Everything else we have looked at has been either universal or absent.

What the licences cap

Retail leverage under the FCA and ASIC is capped at 30:1 on major FX with lower limits by asset class, tabulated in leverage limits by regulator. An account under this brand offering several hundred to one is neither of the two entities above.

Compensation: the FSCS stands behind the UK entity for eligible claimants; Australia has no equivalent scheme of that kind.

What to establish before funding

Open the full register record, not the status line. This review exists because the summary is genuinely ambiguous here, and the underlying facts are not.

Confirm the entity in your client agreement. OANDA Europe Limited and OANDA Australia Pty Ltd are two of the group’s companies, and clients outside the UK, EEA and Australia are usually onboarded elsewhere.

Check which permissions carry Retail (Investment), which is the field that decides whether the authorisation is about you at all.

Read the leverage on offer before the licence claims. It identifies the rulebook in one line, faster than any page of marketing.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

We read the full FCA register record for FRN 542574, including status, payment-services status, client money permission, permissions with customer types and previous names, and searched the ASIC and CySEC registers we hold locally, all on 25 August 2026. The firm’s site blocked automated access, so account specifics are left unstated rather than taken from third-party reviews.

We have not opened an account, deposited money, or tested spreads, execution, support or withdrawals. We have also not established why the payment-institution authorisation was cancelled; the register records the fact and not the reason, and we are not going to guess at it. caution is our default where we have not been a client.

Sources

• FCA — Financial Services Register, FRN 542574
• ASIC Financial Services Licensee Register, AFSL 412981
• CySEC — register of Cypriot investment firms