Wikilix
Licence record

Bancara: FSCA licence 51687

Issuing authority
Financial Sector Conduct Authority
Jurisdiction
South Africa
Last checked
Sep 25, 2026

This is Wikilix's record of a licence issued by Financial Sector Conduct Authority. It sets out what the register says, what we checked, and what the authority's own rules protect.

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RecordModified Sep 25, 2026

Licence Verification Record

Financial Sector Conduct Authority 51687

Wikilix read the FSCA register on Sep 25, 2026. This is what it said.

Issuing authority
Financial Sector Conduct Authority
Jurisdiction
South Africa
Effective
Aug 11, 2021
Register status
Active FSP but belongs to Magauta Capital (Pty) Ltd, not Bancara

Checked Sep 25, 2026

A licence record describes what an authority published. It is not an endorsement, and Wikilix does not issue authorisations.

wikilix.com/brokers/bancara/licenses/financial-sector-conduct-authority/51687Fields on file 7 / 11

Our check
Checked

What we checked

This authorisation is in force but limited — it does not carry the same protections as a full trading licence.

Wikilix check
Limited
Authority strength
Tier 2
Jurisdiction
South Africa
Last checked
Sep 25, 2026
Register says
Active FSP but belongs to Magauta Capital (Pty) Ltd, not Bancara

Finding

A South African Category I advice and intermediary licence, mostly insurance products, with derivatives only as adviser and intermediary. It is held by Magauta Capital (Pty) Ltd, a different company, and does not authorise running a trading platform or holding client trading funds. Client protection: None for Bancara. The licence belongs to another company and is an advice/intermediary authorisation, not a dealer licence.. Effective: 11 Aug 2021.

The register

What the authority publishes

Printed as the register prints it. A field that is missing here is one nobody has recorded, not one the register leaves blank.

Licence number
51687
Register status
Active FSP but belongs to Magauta Capital (Pty) Ltd, not Bancara
Effective from
Expires
No expiry shown
The authority

About FSCA

Financial Sector Conduct Authority is the authority that issued this licence, and the jurisdiction it applies in is South Africa.

Full name
Financial Sector Conduct Authority
Jurisdiction
South Africa
Strength
Tier 2Well-established regimes with real supervision, usually with lower compensation limits than tier 1.
Established
1991
Oversight
A government or statutory body
Firms we track under it
19 firms
Regulates
Forex, Bond, Stocks, Fund, Derivatives, CFD
Licences it issues
ODP Category IIA – Principal & Agency OTC Derivatives
Typical cost of a licence
USD 50,000-100,000 + ~USD 270k capital
Public register
Searchable by the public
Transparency
High

FSCA is classed as an offshore regime. An offshore registration can be entirely legitimate, but it typically means lower capital requirements, no compensation scheme, and a complaint route that is harder to use from abroad.

Protection

What this licence protects

FSCA's own rules for the firms it authorises.

  • Compensation schemeUp to ZAR 500,000
  • Complaints routeFSCA Dispute Resolution
  • Maximum leverage1:30
This describes the authority's regime, not how Bancara applies it.
The holder

Who holds this licence

The licence above is recorded against Bancara. A licence is issued to a legal company, so the companies below are what you would search a corporate register for.

Broker
Bancara LTD
Based in
Comoros
Wikilix score
40.4the firm’s overall score, not a rating of this licence

Recorded companies

None of these matches the name the register printed, so we do not say which one holds this licence.

  • BANCARA LTDComoros
  • ISLAND CAPITAL LTD.Vanuatu · International Company · Reg. 700627 · Jun 6, 2022
  • ALTUS INVESTIUM LTDAustralia · Australian Public Company · Reg. ACN 169 233 078 / ABN 87 169 233 078 · Apr 24, 2014
  • MAGAUTA CAPITAL (PTY) LTDSouth Africa
Provenance

Where this record came from

Every date below has already happened. We do not publish a promised next-update date, because we do not schedule per-licence re-checks.

Official source
The issuing authority’s registerPublished by the authority, not by Wikilix.
Last checked by Wikilix
Record last edited
When this entry was last changed in our database, which may be a correction rather than a change at the register.
Wikilix records what an authority published. It does not issue or endorse authorisations.
Also on record

Other licences Bancara holds

3 other licences are on record for Bancara.

Frequently Asked Questions

Questions about this licence

Answered from this register entry and the authority’s own record.

Most Popular Questions

Yes. An account is treated as dormant after 90 consecutive days with no trades and no deposits or withdrawals, and logging in does not count as activity. A monthly dormancy fee then applies, with 30 days notice before the first charge. The amount is not published. The fee cannot push your balance below zero, but it can run it down to nothing.

Yes. Bancara publishes a free demo account with live market data and no funding requirement, described as unlimited. Given the 10,000 USD minimum on the cheapest live tier, the demo is the only way to see the platform before committing a substantial sum.

By email at inquiry@bancara.com, through the contact form, or via the individual office addresses for Geneva, Dubai, Johannesburg and Hong Kong. There is no live chat. The only telephone number published anywhere on the site is a single Swiss number, and the same number is listed for all four offices.

Bancara states that client money is held separately from company funds at independent institutions, but it names no bank and no auditor, and no compensation scheme or ombudsman covers any of its claimed permissions. Its client agreement is explicit that segregation, insolvency treatment and compensation status all vary by which group entity you contract with. It does commit in writing to negative balance protection for retail clients.

Its registration form offers a closed list of 223 jurisdictions, which is effectively the world minus the countries it refuses. Bancara names 31 restricted jurisdictions including the United States, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Vietnam and Kenya, and the signup form also requires you to confirm you are not a US citizen. One oddity: Cote d'Ivoire appears on the restricted list yet is still selectable at signup.

Five asset classes as contracts for difference: currencies, indices, commodities, shares and digital currencies. The broker states it offers over 80 major, minor and exotic currency pairs. It does not publish counts for its index, commodity, share or crypto ranges.

Bancara X, the broker's own web and mobile platform, and MetaTrader 5 for desktop and mobile with Expert Advisors and back-testing. AutoBancara adds automated strategies that run inside MetaTrader 5 on cloud infrastructure, Cooma Social provides copy trading, and the TipRanks research service is included. The broker states that none of these carry an extra charge.

No withdrawal fee is published for any channel, but that is not the same as free. Section 9 of the client agreement lists withdrawal processing fees among the charges that may apply and points to a fee schedule that does not appear anywhere on the site, so the actual cost is only disclosed after you open an account.

The client agreement quotes one to five business days for approved requests, depending on method. Money is returned to the source it came from, so a card deposit goes back to that card and a bank deposit back to that account; if you funded from several sources Bancara may split the withdrawal across them proportionally. Funds tied up in open positions or margin cannot be withdrawn until those are closed.

Spreads start at 1.2 pips on the Advanced and Premium accounts, 1 pip on Exclusive and 0.8 pips on VIP, and no commission is published for any tier. Beyond that the picture is incomplete: the client agreement reserves the right to charge commissions, overnight financing, currency conversion fees, inactivity fees and withdrawal processing fees, and refers to a fee schedule the website does not publish.

Up to 1:200 on foreign exchange, stated on the broker's platform page. The account comparison table itself gives leverage for every tier only as permitted by regulation, so the cap that actually applies to you depends on which group entity you are assigned to and how you are classified.

10,000 USD, for the entry-level Advanced account. The other tiers are Premium at 25,000 USD, Exclusive at 100,000 USD and VIP at 250,000 USD. That entry point is many times higher than most retail brokers ask for, so Bancara is not accessible to a small first-time account.

Nothing found shows Bancara taking clients' money and refusing to return it, and there is no complaint record against it. What can be shown is that it publishes company registration numbers under a heading that reads Type of Licence, and claims licensed operations in Europe while holding no European authorisation of any kind. That is a serious accuracy problem on the one subject where accuracy matters most, so the honest description is high risk and unverified rather than proven fraud.

Bancara names four companies. BANCARA LTD in the Comoros is the one it presents as its own, and it is also the one that could not be found on any public record. The other three are ISLAND CAPITAL LTD in Vanuatu, ALTUS INVESTIUM LTD in Australia and MAGAUTA CAPITAL (PTY) LTD in South Africa. Which of them becomes your counterparty is decided by Bancara during onboarding and is not disclosed in advance.

No regulation could be confirmed for Bancara. Its regulation page names six entries, but the three that cover its own company, BANCARA LTD, come from an offshore Comoros authority that runs no public licence lookup, and the broker publishes no certificate or verification link for any of them. Of the three entries naming other companies, two turn out on official registries to be company registration numbers rather than licences. Treat the trading service as unsupervised.

Licence 51687 was issued by Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), the financial authority for South Africa.
Bancara holds this FSCA licence. A licence on record means the authority published an entry; it is not an endorsement.
We located this entry on the FSCA register. Note that confirming a register ENTRY is not the same as confirming a live licence — the register’s own wording on this page is what states its current standing.
Wikilix rates FSCA tier 2: a well-established regime with real supervision, usually with lower compensation limits than a tier-1 authority.
Yes, FSCA is classed as an offshore regime. That can be a legitimate registration, but it usually means lower capital requirements, no compensation scheme, and a complaint route that is harder to use from abroad.
This page links straight to the FSCA register. Search it for 51687, and for the name Bancara rather than the trading brand.
Bancara has 3 other licences on record with Wikilix, across 3 jurisdictions. They are listed further down this page.
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