Three regulators, three different registers: what each one tells you, and the question none of them answers

We have now read the FCA, ASIC and CySEC registers field by field across the same set of brokers. Each publishes something the other two do not, and choosing which to open depends on what you are actually trying to find out.

Last verified 9 September 2026 · how we check

Over the past month we have read three regulators’ registers against the same brokers, field by field. They are not three versions of the same thing. Each publishes something the other two do not, and the one you should open depends on the question in your head.

What each register actually publishes

No column is complete, and the gaps do not overlap. That is the practical finding from a month of reading them.

What only one of them will tell you

Only CySEC publishes the approved domain. The field names the websites a licence covers, and we found that six of ten Cypriot licences do not cover the plain global .com the brand is known by. XTB’s covers www.xtb.com/cy; Tickmill’s covers www.tickmill.com/eu. Neither the FCA nor ASIC carries anything equivalent, so outside Cyprus there is no regulator telling you which door belongs to which company.

Only CySEC names the countries. The field listing non-EU markets a firm has declared runs from twenty-seven at Plus500CY down to none at six of the ten.

Only the FCA publishes disciplinary history. We read it across thirteen firms and found one entry: a Final Notice and a £205,128 fine on Plus500UK. Twelve were empty. That single field is the strongest thing a register holds, because it records the regulator acting rather than a firm applying.

Only ASIC gives you the whole thing at once. The full list of 6,525 licensees downloads as one dataset, which is how we found that searching for FP Markets or IC Markets returns nothing: the licences belong to First Prudential Markets and International Capital Markets. A one-firm-at-a-time search would never surface that.

Which one to open, by question

“Is this company regulated at all?” Any of the three, and the answer takes a minute. Search the legal entity name from the client agreement, never the brand, which is the failure that makes both FP Markets and IC Markets invisible in Australia.

“Can they take me as a client?” The FCA’s customer type on the dealing permissions, or the end of ASIC’s authorisation sentence. We found two of fourteen UK licences carry no retail permission and one of eleven Australian ones stops at wholesale clients.

“Is this the right website?” CySEC only, and only for Cypriot firms.

“Has the regulator ever acted against them?” The FCA’s disciplinary history. It is one click from the status line and almost nobody opens it.

“What may they actually sell me?” ASIC’s authorisation text, read per activity rather than as a flat list, because a class under advice does not carry over to dealing.

One group, three registers, four companies

The clearest argument for reading all three is a brand that appears on all of them. Eightcap does, and each register holds a different piece.

Four companies, one brand. Three are licensed by regulators we can query and each licence covers something different. The fourth sells prop firm evaluations and is visible only inside a PDF linked from a footer.

Open one register and you get a true answer to a narrow question. Open all three and the shape of the group appears: which company takes which client, through which website, under which rules, and where the perimeter of supervision actually ends.

That last point is the one worth carrying. The registers do not describe a company; they describe the parts of a company that applied for permission. Everything outside is legal, common, and invisible to all three.

The question none of them answers

Every one of these registers is about permission. Not one is about performance, price or conduct.

No register holds spreads, commission or overnight costs, and those are where authorised firms differ most from each other: two identically licensed brokers can cost three times as much per round turn. None holds fill quality or behaviour during volatility. None holds withdrawal times, support quality, or whether a dispute gets resolved, unless it goes far enough wrong to reach the disciplinary field.

So a register check answers one question completely and says nothing about the others. It is worth three minutes because it is the only question where being wrong costs the whole balance rather than a few basis points, and because the alternative sources for it are marketing pages.

The order we would run them in

One. Take the legal entity name and company number from the client agreement.

Two. Search the register of the jurisdiction that entity sits in, by number.

Three. Read three fields: whether it may take retail clients, whether anything sits in disciplinary history, and whether the conditions on the licence are the industry-wide kind or written for that firm alone.

Four. If the firm is Cypriot, check the approved domain against the address in your browser.

Five. Stop, because the register has nothing further to tell you, and treat everything after that as a separate exercise with different sources.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

This page summarises field-level reading done across the three registers between 5 August and 9 September 2026: FCA records for fourteen firms through the register API, our local copy of the ASIC dataset of 6,525 licensees, and CySEC entity pages for ten Cypriot companies. Each finding links to the page where it is set out with its own dates and figures.

The comparison covers the fields we have used. Each regulator publishes more than we have read, and other regulators publish differently again; the three here are the ones we query directly. Nothing on this page is a judgement about any firm, and no register we have read is a substitute for the client agreement, which is the document that names the company holding your money.

Sources

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