10 Longest-Established ASIC Regulated Brokers

Ten firms have held an Australian Securities and Investments Commission licence longer than any other broker in the WIKILIX database. The oldest of them, J.P. Morgan, carries a recorded opening date of 1799. The tenth, Plotio Global Financial, dates from 1983. All ten were selected from the 135 ASIC-licensed brokers with at least ten years on record, and the order below is nothing but the opening date, earliest first.

How this ranking was built

One field decides the order: the opening date recorded against each broker. Not the score, and not the number of licences held. The pool was every broker in our database holding an ASIC licence with at least ten years of operation, which came to 135 firms on the day this page was built. Of those, 67 opened before 2010 and 25 before the year 2000.

Two firms with opening dates earlier than Plotio's are missing from the table. Both carry a WIKILIX status flag, and a flagged record does not go into a hand-picked ten. That screen took 36 of the 135 out of contention altogether: 19 recorded as suspicious clones, 9 as offshore, 6 as exceeding their licence scope and 2 as operating without regulation.

The number beside each name is the WIKILIX score, our own composite rating for that broker. It played no part in the ordering, and the two measures do not track each other closely. IG, founded in 1974, scores 69.5 and is the strongest of the ten. J.P. Morgan, older by 175 years, scores 59.1. Across the full pool of 135 the median score is 52.4, and the range runs from 28.2 to 84.8.

What an opening date does not tell you

Read the top of this table as a company founding date, not as the launch of a trading desk. HSBC was founded in 1865 and Bank of Queensland in 1874, well over a century before retail currency trading existed in any recognisable form. Commonwealth Bank's 1911 date and Travelex's 1976 date describe the parent business, and the ASIC-licensed activity recorded against them began far later.

That is also why this list looks nothing like the usual roundup of long-running Australian brokers. Among the retail names in the same pool, IG has the earliest date at 1974, with Interactive Brokers recorded at 1996, FXCM at 2000, IC Markets at 2007 and Pepperstone at 2010. A firm's age says something about institutional durability. It says nothing about the platform or the conditions on a retail account opened tomorrow.

What an ASIC licence covers

ASIC is classified as a tier-1 onshore regulator in the WIKILIX database, and 236 brokers on this site hold at least one ASIC licence. Firms dealing in derivatives for Australian clients need an Australian Financial Services Licence, and complaints a firm cannot settle go to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. ASIC also caps retail CFD leverage through a product intervention order. The maximum leverage figures in our records for these ten run from 1:1 to 1:1000, and those are maximums recorded for the firm rather than what an Australian retail account will be offered.

Checks worth running before you open an account

• Look up the licence number on ASIC's own registers at https://asic.gov.au/online-services/search-asics-registers/ and confirm it is current.
• Check that the legal entity named on your account agreement is the one holding the licence. Seven of these ten are recorded with licences from more than one authority, and the entity you contract with decides which rules apply to you.
• Confirm which regulator covers your own account, since a group can hold an ASIC licence and still onboard you through an entity somewhere else.
• Read what happens to client money if the firm fails, and whether the Australian Financial Complaints Authority at https://www.afca.org.au is open to you.

What this page cannot tell you matters just as much. We hold no spread data and no execution statistics, so nothing here ranks cost or fill quality. The database also has no field for which countries a broker accepts clients from. Every figure reflects the WIKILIX records as of today, and licence entries change.