BVI FSC Regulated Forex Brokers

Ten brokers in the WIKILIX records hold a licence from the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission, the BVI FSC. They are listed below in order of overall score, from OANDA at 64.9 down to iFOREX Europe at 41, with a median close to 52. What stands out first is how few of them lean on this licence alone: every one of the ten also holds at least one other registration, and eight carry a tier-1 licence from an authority such as the FCA, ASIC or the NFA.

The group is older than an offshore register usually looks. Five of the ten opened before 2010, and the oldest, PRIME CDEX, dates to 1993. Leverage is where they split hardest: iFOREX Europe caps out at 1:30 under its Cyprus entity, while easyMarkets advertises up to 1:2000 on an offshore account. Four of the ten carry a recorded status flag rather than a clean one, and one of those, InstaForex, is the only firm here actually headquartered in the British Virgin Islands.

What a BVI FSC licence is, and where it sits

The BVI FSC is the financial regulator of the British Virgin Islands, a jurisdiction that sits offshore rather than in a major onshore market. WIKILIX classes it as a tier-3 authority. That places it below the tier-1 regulators several of these firms also answer to, and it matters for a plain reason: an offshore licence usually carries lighter capital rules and no statutory compensation scheme of the kind UK or EU clients receive. Complaints run through the commission rather than an independent ombudsman.

This is why the other regulators a firm holds are the more useful thing to read. When MultiBank Group or OANDA appears here, the BVI entity is one leg of a wider structure that also answers to the FCA, ASIC or BaFin. When a firm holds the BVI licence and little else, that offshore registration is the whole of its oversight.

Holding this licence is not the same as being based here

Only InstaForex, of these ten, is domiciled in the British Virgin Islands. OANDA is a United States company, MultiBank Group and iFOREX Europe are registered in Cyprus, CFI in Mauritius, easyMarkets in Australia. A BVI licence is a registration a firm can obtain from almost anywhere, so this list answers who holds the licence, not who is headquartered on the islands. It also says nothing about which clients a broker will take on: whether any of these firms will open an account for a resident of your country is set by each firm's own terms, and you have to read them.

Before you act on any name here

• Work out which company you would actually be contracting with. Several of these brokers run a separate entity per region, and the BVI arm is often the one used for clients outside the EU or UK.
• Match the leverage to the entity. easyMarkets showing 1:2000 and iFOREX Europe showing 1:30 are the same brand behaving differently depending on which licence covers the account you open.
• Read the recorded status. Turing and InstaForex are flagged here as suspected clones, and CFI and FIBO as offshore; treat a flag as a prompt to check further, not a verdict.
• Confirm the licence on the commission's own register before you deposit. A firm can sit in our records and still have changed its standing since we last looked.

This reflects the licences WIKILIX has on record as of today. Confirm any BVI FSC entry directly on the BVI FSC public register before you commit money.