10 Longest-Established FCA Regulated Brokers

Ten firms hold the earliest opening dates among the 176 brokers in the WIKILIX database that carry a Financial Conduct Authority licence and have been trading for at least ten years. The oldest is Bank of Scotland, with a recorded opening date of 1695. The most recent firm on this page opened in 1927.

That range says something about the pool. An FCA licence is held by banks and institutional firms as well as by the retail trading platforms most people have in mind when they search for a broker, and once the 176 are ordered by age, the familiar retail names do not appear until well down the list. IG, opened in 1974, is the seventeenth oldest record in the pool and the first one most traders will recognise.

How this list was built

The order is the opening date recorded on each broker record, oldest first. Nothing else moves a firm up or down. The WIKILIX score sits in the table for context and plays no part in the ranking, and no judgement about pricing or service went into the selection. Brokers with no recorded opening date are dropped by the query itself, so this ranks what we hold a date for.

Two things shaped the ten. Records carrying a WIKILIX status label other than 'regulation' were left out, which is why Santander, recorded at 1857 and labelled 'exceeded', does not sit fifth. And StoneX appears twice because the database holds two separate records under that name, StoneX One at 1866 and StoneX Group at 1924. Both were kept, because both are separate rows in the result.

What the other 166 look like

Forty-one of the 176 opened before 2000, and 95 before 2010. The median WIKILIX score across the pool is 61.3, inside a range that runs from 40.7 to 91.3, the top of it held by Marex, which opened in 2005. 134 of the 176 hold licences from two or more authorities, so an FCA entry is rarely the only one a firm has. Fifty-one carry a status label other than 'regulation': 25 are recorded as suspicious clones and 12 as offshore. Recorded maximum leverage across the pool runs from 1:1 up to 1:2000, and that figure is the highest recorded for the group rather than something specific to its FCA licensed entity.

What a long record does not prove

A company founded in 1695 and a retail trading account are different things. The FCA register lists permissions per legal entity, and the permission that matters is the one attached to the company named on your account agreement, not to the brand on the website. None of the ten firms here has a trading platform recorded against it in our database, while IG, further down the same pool, has two. Age tells you a business has survived. It does not tell you what it will sell you.

Checks worth doing before you deposit

• Look the firm up on the FCA Financial Services Register and note its firm reference number.
• Read the permissions on that entry and check they cover the product you are being offered.
• Confirm the legal entity on the agreement is the one holding the licence, and not an overseas company with a similar name.
• Check whether FSCS cover applies to what you are buying, because it does not cover trading losses.

What this page cannot tell you: spreads, commissions, execution quality, minimum deposits, or whether any of these firms accepts clients from where you live. None of that sits in the data behind this ranking. The licences and dates shown reflect the WIKILIX database as of today, and any licence should be confirmed on the regulator's own register before money moves.