Checking a broker on the regulator's register: four ways the check goes wrong
We ran the same register checks on fourteen brokers. The advice to look a firm up is right, and it fails in four specific ways that nobody warns you about. Each one has a worked example and a fix.
Everyone tells you to check the regulator. Nobody tells you what the check returns when it goes wrong, and it goes wrong in four ways we can now demonstrate, because we ran it on fourteen brokers and hit all four.
The four failures
| Failure | What you see | What is true | Worked example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand is not the entity | no result | licensed in three jurisdictions | ThinkMarkets |
| Two firms share a name | two authorised firms | one is a wholesale venue | Vantage |
| Composite status | not “Authorised” | investment permissions live | OANDA |
| Licence excludes retail | “Authorised” | cannot take you as a client | Exness (UK) |
The fourth is the dangerous one, because the search succeeds and the answer is still no.
1. The brand is not the company
Registers index legal entity names. Brands are trading names, and the two often share no words at all.
Search “ThinkMarkets” at the FCA, ASIC or CySEC and you get nothing. The firm holds four licences across three regulators, and every one of them is issued to a company beginning TF Global. An empty result reads as “not regulated” and means “you searched the wrong string”.
Across our reviews, four brands out of eight are unsearchable this way. Five firms trade under a name their licence was not issued to: Swissquote’s UK entity was MIG Capital (Europe) Limited until 2014, OANDA traded as FXTrade until 2021, ThinkMarkets’ Cyprus company is listed as ex A-Conversio Capital Ltd.
Fix: take the entity name from the client agreement or the site footer, then search that. Every licensed firm prints its legal name in the small text.
2. Two firms, one first word
The opposite failure, and it feels like success.
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, eight years apart with different Companies House numbers. Finding an authorised firm under the name you typed reads as confirmation.
It is not. The second firm holds Professional and Eligible Counterparty on every permission and operates an Organised Trading Facility. It is wholesale market infrastructure and it cannot take a retail client at all.
Fix: match on the Companies House number, not the name. Two firms can share a first word; the company number is unique by construction.
3. The status line is a summary
OANDA Europe Limited returns “See full details” rather than “Authorised”. That is not a downgrade and not a warning. It is what the register shows when one record holds more than one authorisation and they are in different states.
Here the investment permissions are live, with Retail (Investment) named, and the payment-services authorisation is cancelled. For a trading account, the live half is the relevant one. A reader who stops at the status line concludes something false in whichever direction their mood suggests.
Fix: open the record. The status line compresses; the record underneath does not.
4. Authorised, but not for you
This is the one that matters most and the one nobody checks.
Each FCA permission carries a customer type. Those types are Retail (Investment), Professional and Eligible Counterparty, and a licence that omits the first does not cover an ordinary customer.
Exness (UK) Ltd, FRN 730729, is Authorised. All five of its permissions read Professional and Eligible Counterparty. Retail appears nowhere. The firm is properly licensed and is not permitted to deal with you.
The same trap exists in Australia in different words. OX Securities holds a real ASIC licence whose authorisation text ends “to wholesale clients”, while FP Markets, CMC Markets and Pepperstone all close with “to retail and wholesale clients”.
The field that beats all four
Disciplinary history sits on the same record and almost nobody opens it.
A warning-list entry is usually about somebody else. A “no longer authorised” status is usually administrative. An entry in disciplinary history is the regulator recording that it examined this firm, found breaches and acted.
We checked it across thirteen brokers. Twelve are empty. One is not: Plus500UK Ltd carries a Final Notice for breaches of SUP 17 and PRIN 3 and a £205,128 fine, set out in our review.
Reading the warning list without misreading it
Entries fall into three kinds and they mean opposite things.
Clone. Somebody copied the firm’s details. The licensed firm is unaffected.
Name-alike. A similar name, no clone marking, again about somebody else.
The firm’s own domain. The entry names the website clients actually use. That happened
twice in our reviews: fpmarkets.com and icmarkets.com/global, both with offshore
addresses and neither marked as a clone.
The tell is ten seconds long: open the entry and read the URL and address. If they belong to the broker, the warning is about the broker.
And one case defeats even that. At XTB a warned entity is listed at E14 5AA, the authorised firm’s own postcode. When the impersonator copies the address, comparing fields stops working, and only the direction of the check saves you: start at the regulator’s own site and go outward to the broker, never the reverse.
The three-minute procedure
One. Open the client agreement and find the legal entity name and, if given, the firm reference number.
Two. Go to the regulator’s own domain and search that name or number. Confirm the Companies House or licence number matches.
Three. Read three fields: status, customer type on the dealing permissions, and disciplinary history. Then check the warning list for the brand and read which URL any entry names.
Four. Compare the contact details the register holds against the site in front of you. If the domain differs, you are not on the firm’s website.
That is the whole check. It costs nothing, it takes about three minutes, and it answers a question that no amount of reading reviews will.
What a register cannot tell you
Worth being clear about the limits, because a check that answers the wrong question confidently is its own hazard.
Nothing about price. No register holds spreads, commissions or overnight costs, and those are where authorised brokers differ most from each other. Two firms can be identically licensed and one can cost three times the other per round turn.
Nothing about execution. Fill quality, slippage and behaviour during volatility are invisible here. Some of it appears in a firm’s own quarterly reports where those exist, and none of it appears on a licence.
Nothing about how you will be treated. Withdrawal times, support, and whether a dispute gets resolved are outside what a licence records, unless it goes far enough wrong to reach disciplinary history.
Nothing about entities outside the register. Every group in our reviews runs companies in jurisdictions these three registers do not reach, and clients are routinely onboarded there. The register tells you what its own jurisdiction covers, which is why the client agreement is the document that decides.
So the check settles one question completely and says nothing about the others. That question is worth three minutes because it is the only one where being wrong costs the whole balance rather than a few basis points.
What we checked, and what we didn’t
Every example above comes from a register record we read ourselves while writing the reviews linked from this page, between 11 and 26 August 2026. Each review names the licence number and the date we read it.
We are describing the FCA, ASIC and CySEC registers, which are the three we hold or query directly. Other regulators publish different fields, and the four failure modes are about how registers work rather than about any one of them.
We have not opened accounts with any firm mentioned, and nothing here is a recommendation. It is a procedure for answering one narrow question: which company would be holding your money, and what its licence actually permits.
Sources
- FCA — Financial Services Register
- FCA — warning list of unauthorised firms
- ASIC Financial Services Licensee Register
- CySEC — register of Cypriot investment firms