10 Longest-Established CySEC Regulated Brokers

Ten brokers make this list, and they are the ten that hold a Cyprus (CySEC) licence and have operated longer than any others we track with a clean regulation status. The oldest of them traces its founding to 1799. The rest run from the mid twentieth century down to 2003, so every name here has at least two decades behind it, and most have far more.

The single oldest entry is J.P. Morgan, whose corporate lineage dates to 1799 and which holds a CySEC licence alongside the SFC, FCA and ASIC. Two Japanese securities houses sit among the ten, Shizuoka Tokai from 1951 and SHIZUGIN TM from 2000, next to Windsor Brokers, a Cyprus firm operating since 1988. The names a retail trader will recognise sit lower down: Interactive Brokers, licensed since 1996 and the highest scorer of the ten at 72.5, carries eleven regulators on our record; iFOREX Europe dates from the same year; and FXCM, trading since 2000, scores 63.6.

How the ten were ordered, and who is missing

Order here is founding date, oldest first, taken from each broker's recorded opening date. We drew the ten from 144 CySEC licensees that have run for at least ten years, and we kept only those our records mark with a clean regulation status, which is why several older Cyprus firms flagged as suspicious clones do not appear even though they opened earlier. Nine of those 144 were founded before 2000 and 57 before 2010, so age by itself is not rare within this group. What is striking at the top is the character of the names: the oldest CySEC holders are banks and securities houses, not the retail contracts-for-difference shops most people picture.

What a CySEC licence covers, and what it does not

CySEC is the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission, the authority that licenses investment firms in Cyprus under the EU's MiFID rules. A CySEC-authorised firm contributes to the Investor Compensation Fund, which can pay eligible retail clients up to 20,000 euros if the firm fails, and it applies the ESMA retail leverage caps, meaning 1:30 on major currency pairs for retail accounts in the EU. On our own scale CySEC sits at tier 2, not tier 1, so this is genuine European oversight rather than the top-tier standing of the FCA or ASIC.

One column needs reading with care. The leverage we show is the group maximum, not the cap on the CySEC entity. iFOREX Europe's recorded 1:30 lines up with the EU retail limit, while a figure such as Windsor Brokers' 1:2000 belongs to a non-EU arm, not to the account a European client would open.

Before you open an account with any of them

• Confirm the CIF licence number on the CySEC public register, and check the firm is authorised in its own right rather than listed only as a related name.
• Read which legal entity your account sits under. Several of these brokers run a Cyprus company and separate offshore companies, and only the Cyprus one carries the EU protections.
• Check whether the Investor Compensation Fund applies to your account type before you rely on the 20,000 euro figure.
• Match the leverage you are offered against the 1:30 retail cap. A number well above it usually means you are being onboarded to a non-EU entity.

This ranking measures longevity and nothing else. It does not weigh spreads, funding costs or execution quality, and it does not tell you whether any of these firms will accept a client from where you live, which turns on each broker's own terms and the entity you sign with. Age is a fact about a company, not a verdict on it.