Can a Cypriot broker take you if you live outside the EU? The register names the countries, and six of ten name none

CySEC publishes, per firm, which non-EU countries a licensed Cypriot broker may serve. Plus500CY lists 27. XTB lists 5. Six of the ten firms we checked list none at all, and the field sits one click from the licence number.

Last verified 8 September 2026 · how we check

“Regulated by CySEC” is a claim about a company. It says nothing about whether that company may take a client in your country, and if you live outside the European Union the answer is often no.

The Cypriot register answers this directly, in a field called Provision of Services to Countries Outside EU. We read it for ten brokers.

What each licence names

Six of the ten name no country outside the EU. Their Cypriot licence is a European permission and nothing else, which is exactly what it should be, and it is not what a “regulated broker” badge on a global homepage suggests.

The four that do, and where they point

The lists differ in a way that maps onto each group’s market rather than onto size.

XTB names five: Egypt, Nigeria, Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates.

Exness (Cy) names eleven: China, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Republic of Moldova, Switzerland, Seychelles, Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates.

Tickmill Europe names thirteen: Belarus, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Malaysia, Moldova, Nigeria, Province of China, Switzerland, Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates.

Plus500CY names twenty-seven, and the shape is different again: Andorra, Argentina, Bahrain, Chile, Colombia, French Guiana, Gibraltar, Guadeloupe, Isle of Man, Kuwait, La Reunion, Macau, Malaysia, Martinique, Mayotte, Mexico, Monaco, Oman, Panama, Qatar, Saint-Martin, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, United Arab Emirates and Uruguay.

Three of the four lean toward South and South-East Asia, Africa and the former Soviet states. Plus500’s leans toward Latin America, the Gulf and European microstates and overseas territories. Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates are the only entries all four share.

The sentence printed above every list

CySEC prints one line of context on each entry, and it decides how much weight the list carries:

CIFs may provide their services to countries outside the EU provided that they comply with the regulatory regime of the third country.

So the list is where the Cypriot firm has declared it operates. It is not a permission granted by the country at the other end. If your regulator requires a local licence, the Cypriot entry does not supply one, and the firm’s compliance with your rules is a separate question this register does not answer.

That cuts both ways, and both are useful. Seeing your country named tells you the Cypriot company has declared the market. Not seeing it tells you that if the brand takes you anyway, it is doing so through some other company in the group, under some other regime.

Passporting is not presence

The same register page carries a third field, Branch in Member States, and it separates two things that get conflated: the right to serve a country and an office in it.

We read this field on eight of the ten entries, and six of those eight carry no branch at all. XTB’s gives street addresses and telephone numbers for Prague and Bucharest; Plus500CY’s gives one for the Czech Republic.

That is not a quality ranking. A firm can serve twenty-eight member states from Nicosia under passporting rules and never open an office, which is what most of them do and what the single market is for. What the field settles is a narrower question: whether there is anyone to visit, write to or serve papers on inside your own jurisdiction, or whether every route runs back to Cyprus.

For a dispute that a support ticket does not resolve, that distinction is the difference between a local address and an international one.

It also explains a pattern we keep meeting from the other side. When a firm stops operating, the surviving channel is almost always an email address, because there was never an office anywhere else to walk into. Of the five closures we have documented, four ended exactly that way, and the register field above would have said so in advance.

Why this is the question people actually ask

Our search data shows this being asked in almost these words: whether a firm can legally accept clients from a given country of residence, whether it holds a local legal entity or passporting rights, whether it markets into a particular jurisdiction. Those are the right questions and they are rarely answered.

This field answers one part of one of them, precisely, for Cypriot firms. The rest of the answer sits in two places we have already mapped: the customer type on the licence, which decides whether a firm may take retail clients at all and which eleven of fourteen FCA firms we swept carry, and the entity named in the client agreement.

How to read your own case

One. Find the company on the CySEC register of Cypriot investment firms, by name or licence number.

Two. Scroll to Provision of Services to Countries Outside EU. If you live in the EU or EEA, read Cross Border Services to Member States instead, which is a separate and usually much longer list.

Three. If your country is not on either list, the Cypriot company is not the one that would hold your account. Find out which company would, and under which regulator, before you deposit.

That third step is the whole point, and it connects to the other field on the same page: the approved domain, which tells you which website belongs to the Cypriot entity in the first place. Read together, the two fields answer which company and which market from one public page.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

We read the Provision of Services to Countries Outside EU field on the CySEC register entry for each of the ten firms on 8 September 2026, taking the lists in full from the rendered pages rather than from a summary. “Province of China” on the Tickmill entry is the register’s own wording and we reproduce it as published.

We have not verified whether any firm actually accepts clients from any country on or off these lists, which is a question about conduct rather than about the register. We have not checked the local rules of any third country, and the register itself says compliance with those rules is the firm’s responsibility rather than something the Cypriot licence settles.

Sources

• CySEC: register of Cypriot investment firms
• CySEC: Plus500CY Ltd, licence 250/14
• CySEC: Tickmill Europe Ltd, licence 278/15