FCA Regulated Brokers

One hundred and sixty-eight brokers in the WIKILIX database hold a licence from the UK Financial Conduct Authority and carry the status label "regulation" against their record. We hold FCA licences for 252 firms in total. The 84 that are not on this page are the whole reason it is shorter than the register, and the difference is set out below rather than quietly dropped.

Marex Group leads on a score of 91.3, with FCA, SFC and NFA licences recorded and an opening date of November 2005. StoneX Group, opened in 1924, records a maximum leverage of 1:1000. Jefferies Financial Group, dating to 1962, is one of the many firms here holding an FCA licence without being headquartered in Britain.

The list in numbers

• 168 brokers, drawn from the 252 FCA licence holders on our records.
• Scores run from 43.8 to 91.3, with a median of 61.2. Ninety-six score 60 or above, and 33 reach 70.
• 69 opened before 2010. Exactly half of the list, 84 firms, has been operating for fifteen years or more.
• 133 hold licences from two or more authorities. Interactive Brokers Hong Kong is recorded against eleven.
• 73 are headquartered in the United Kingdom. The other 95 are domiciled elsewhere and hold an FCA licence for the part of the business that needs one.
• 45 record a maximum leverage of 1:30 or below, and 53 record 1:500 or higher.
• 8 have no opening date on record, so they sit outside every age figure above.

How we built this list

Two conditions, both read from our own records. A firm must hold at least one licence issued by the Financial Conduct Authority, which the WIKILIX register classes as a tier-1 onshore authority. Its recorded status must be "regulation" rather than one of the six other status labels we use.

That second condition is what removes the 84. Forty-three of them are flagged as suspicious clones, eighteen as offshore, twelve as exceeding the scope of the licence they hold, nine as operating without regulation, and one carries a scam report. Those labels are ours, and firms move between them. Some of the excluded names are ones a reader would expect to find on a page like this. That is exactly why the boundary is stated instead of hidden.

The order is the WIKILIX score, highest first. The score is built from the licence records and company history we hold for a firm, together with its recorded trading conditions. It measures nothing about service quality, and it is not a recommendation.

What an FCA licence covers

Authorisation means the FCA has approved a named legal entity to carry on specified regulated activities, and that entity appears on the Financial Services Register with its own firm reference number. Client money has to be kept apart from the firm's own funds. If an authorised firm fails, eligible claims may fall to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

The entity matters more than the brand does. A group can run one licensed company in London and an unlicensed one somewhere else under the same logo, and your protection follows whichever entity your contract names. Ebury Partners Markets has six regulators recorded against it, and each of those licences attaches to a particular company in a particular place.

Before you open an account

• Look up the firm reference number on the FCA's own register at register.fca.org.uk rather than trusting the number printed on a website.
• Match the legal entity named in the client agreement to the entity on the register. They are frequently not the same company.
• Check which permissions that entity actually holds. Authorisation to arrange deals is not authorisation to hold your money.
• Read the FCA's guidance on cloned firms before sending funds to bank details you were emailed.

What this page cannot tell you: spreads, commissions, execution quality, minimum deposits, or whether a firm will take you on as a client from where you live. None of that sits in our records, so none of it is here. The licence data reflects what the WIKILIX database holds today, and a register entry can change between our check and your deposit.