The FCA register has a Requirements field: thirteen of fourteen brokers carry one, and only a single condition is about the firm itself
A requirement on a licence sounds alarming and usually is not. Eleven of the fourteen firms we swept carry the same industry-wide condition from November 2023. One carries a ring-fence naming two agreements by date, and two hold a permission to approve other companies' adverts.
Open any FCA firm record and there is a section called Requirements. It records conditions the regulator has attached to that licence, and it sounds like the place where trouble would show.
We read it on fourteen brokers. Thirteen carry a requirement, which would be an alarming number if the field meant what it appears to mean. It does not, and knowing why is the useful part.
What the sweep returned
| What the requirement says | Firms | Dated |
|---|---|---|
| Can approve its own financial promotions, its group’s and its ARs’ | 11 | 6 November 2023 |
| Can also approve promotions for other unauthorised persons | 2 | April and June 2026 |
| Firm-specific condition on the business itself | 1 | December 2020 |
| No requirement recorded | 1 |
The eleven are Exness (UK), FP Markets, OANDA Europe, Pepperstone, Plus500UK, Swissquote UK, TF Global, Tickmill UK, Vantage Global Prime, Vantage Capital Markets and XTB. Every one of them carries the identical sentence with the identical effective date.
A condition shared by eleven firms on one day is a rule change, not a finding about any of them. Reading it as a mark against a broker would be reading the regulatory calendar as a disciplinary record.
The one that is about the firm
Eightcap Group Ltd, FRN 921296, carries a second requirement dated 23 December 2020, and this one names companies and documents:
Eightcap Pty Ltd shall not directly or indirectly be involved with or financially benefit from Eightcap Group Ltd’s business with the exception of services and fees outlined in the service level agreement (dated 01.06.2020) and liquidity agreement (dated 13.03.2020) or agreements on substantially similar terms.
That is a ring-fence. The Australian company is barred from benefiting from the UK company’s business, except through two agreements the regulator identifies by date.
It is the only condition across fourteen firms that describes an arrangement rather than a regime, and it is exactly the sort of thing a licence check is supposed to surface. It also fits what we already knew about this group: Eightcap runs separate licensed companies in the UK, Australia and Cyprus, and a fourth Seychelles entity outside all three sells prop firm evaluations.
The two that may approve other companies’ adverts
Eightcap Group and CMC Markets UK carry a longer version of the promotions requirement, dated 17 April 2026 and 16 June 2026:
This firm can: (1) approve its own financial promotions as well as those of members of its wider group and, in certain circumstances, those of its appointed representatives; and (2) approve financial promotions for other unauthorised persons for the following types of investment.
Clause two is the difference. Since the UK tightened the rules on who may sign off investment adverts, an unauthorised company needs an authorised firm to approve its promotions. These two brokers are permitted to be that firm for outside companies, on a list of investment types the register links separately.
That is a permission rather than a restriction, and it points the other way from a warning: a firm trusted to police other people’s marketing. For a reader it matters in one narrow case. If you see an investment advert from a company you cannot find on the register, someone authorised approved it, and the register records who is allowed to.
What we did not find
The sweep is as informative for its absences as for its entries, and this is the part a reader should take away.
No firm in the set carries a restriction on taking new clients. None carries a condition on holding client money. None is barred from a product, a market or a category of customer through this field. Those are the conditions that would change what a broker may do with your account, and across fourteen licences none appears.
The two kinds we did find are narrower than that. One governs who may sign off marketing. The other governs how money moves between two companies in the same group. Neither reaches the account of a person reading the register.
That is a useful baseline, because it means the field behaves as a low-noise signal. If you open a firm’s Requirements and find something that is not a dated industry condition and not about promotions, you are looking at something the regulator wrote for that firm alone, and it is worth reading twice.
How to read this field without misreading it
Check the effective date first. A condition shared by many firms on one date is a rule that landed on the industry. Eleven of our fourteen share 6 November 2023.
Look for names and documents. A requirement that identifies companies, agreements or dates is about that firm. Eightcap’s names two agreements and a sister company; the other thirteen name nobody.
Do not confuse it with disciplinary history. That is a separate field on the same record, and across thirteen firms we checked earlier only one had an entry: a Final Notice and a £205,128 fine on Plus500UK. A requirement is forward-looking, a condition on how the firm may operate. A disciplinary entry is backward-looking, a record that the regulator acted.
Read it alongside customer type. The permission that decides whether a firm may take you at all sits elsewhere on the same page, and we found two of fourteen licences carry no retail permission.
What the field is worth
Not much on most records, and a great deal on a few. The honest summary of a fourteen-firm sweep is that the Requirements field is nearly always boilerplate, and the one time it is not, it tells you something no marketing page ever would: that a regulator looked at a group structure and drew a line through it.
That is the same reason we read fields nobody reads. Most come back empty. Our page on four ways a register check goes wrong exists because the one that does not come back empty is the one that matters, and you cannot know which in advance without opening it.
What we checked, and what we didn’t
We read the Requirements field on the FCA register record for fourteen firms on 9 September 2026, using our own tooling against the register API, and the quotations above are the full text as published. IC Markets (EU) Ltd returned no requirement and shows as no longer authorised, effective 11 December 2023.
We have not obtained the service level agreement or liquidity agreement named in Eightcap’s requirement, which are private documents; the register states their dates and we repeat them. We make no claim about why that condition was imposed, and the register does not say.