Searching ASIC for FP Markets or IC Markets returns nothing, and both hold Australian licences

We swept the full register of 6,525 Australian financial services licensees for the brokers we review. Two of the best-known brands are invisible to a search for their own name, one licence is wholesale-only, and one brand holds two licences that are not the same thing.

Last verified 8 September 2026 · how we check

Australia publishes its whole licensee register as a downloadable dataset: 6,525 firms, each with the licence number, the company name and the full authorisation text. We hold a copy and swept it for every broker in our reviews.

Two things came out of it that a person typing a brand name into a search box would never see.

The brands that are not in the register

Search the Australian register for FP Markets and you get nothing. Search for IC Markets and you get nothing. Both hold live Australian licences.

Neither company name contains the brand. “FP” is the initials of First Prudential; “IC” is the initials of International Capital. A search on the trading name returns an empty result, and an empty result reads as not regulated to almost everyone who sees one.

This is the first of the four register failures we set out in checking a broker on the regulator’s register, and here are two more worked examples of it from a different regulator.

What the sweep found for everyone else

The rest of the brands we review do appear under recognisable names, and the authorisation text answers the question that matters: which clients the licence covers.

Eleven licences cover an ordinary client. One does not. The authorisation on OX Securities ends at wholesale clients, which means the firm is properly licensed and is not permitted to deal with a retail customer under that licence.

The trap that repeats across two regulators

The register also holds Vantage PI Pty Ltd, AFSL 411126, whose authorisation is wholesale only, alongside Vantage Global Prime at 428901, which covers retail.

That shape is familiar. In the United Kingdom the FCA register holds two authorised firms whose names begin with Vantage: Vantage Global Prime LLP under FRN 590299, and Vantage Capital Markets LLP under FRN 416697, the second of which holds Professional and Eligible Counterparty on every permission and operates a trading venue.

Finding an authorised firm under the name you typed feels like confirmation and is not one. The fix is mechanical: match on the company number from the client agreement, not on the name.

The dataset also dates every licence

Each row carries the date the licence started and the registered address, which answers a question marketing pages avoid: how long the company behind the brand has actually been licensed here.

The oldest of these licences is twenty-two years old and the newest thirteen. That is not a ranking either, but it is a fact the brand’s own “founded in” line does not have to match, and here it is checkable in one column.

The address column adds one more detail to the Vantage pair above. Vantage Global Prime is registered in Sydney; Vantage PI is in Melbourne. Two different cities, two different licences, one first word. Nothing in the dataset says the two are related, and that is exactly the point: the name is not evidence either way.

Why the Australian register is the easiest of the three to check

Three practical differences make this the register we would start with.

The whole dataset is downloadable. ASIC publishes the full licensee list as an open dataset on data.gov.au, so the search runs locally over every firm at once instead of one query at a time. That is how we found the two brands that are invisible to a name search: the entity was found by matching what the licence actually covers rather than by guessing a company name.

The authorisation text is plain English. It states in words which classes of financial product the firm may deal in and for which clients, ending in the phrase that settles the retail question.

There is no equivalent field to hunt for. In the United Kingdom the customer type sits inside individual permissions, which the register shows one block at a time, and it can appear under one activity but not another. In Australia it is one sentence.

Cyprus adds two fields neither of the others has, the approved domain and the non-EU countries a licence names. Between the three registers, the questions of which company, which clients and which market are all answerable before you deposit and none of them costs anything.

The three-line check for Australia

One. Open the client agreement and find the company name and ACN or ABN, not the brand.

Two. Search the ASIC register by that number. The dataset carries the licence number, the registered address and the licence start date.

Three. Read the authorisation text to the end. “To retail and wholesale clients” covers an ordinary customer. “To wholesale clients” does not, whatever the marketing says.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

We swept our local copy of the ASIC Financial Services Licensee dataset, 6,525 licences, on 8 September 2026, matching against the brands in our reviews and reading the authorisation condition on each result. The entity names, licence numbers and client classes above come from that dataset, and the FCA reference numbers from the UK register.

We have not verified that each brand’s Australian entity is the one that would take a given client, which the client agreement decides and which varies by country of residence. A licence covering retail clients means the firm may deal with them, not that it will accept any particular applicant.

Sources

• ASIC Financial Services Licensee Register, full dataset
• CySEC: register of Cypriot investment firms