FINTRAC Registered Brokers and How They Differ From CIRO

Nineteen brokers in the WIKILIX database hold a registration with FINTRAC, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada. This page lists every one of them, ranked by WIKILIX score, from Ebury at 84.8 down to two Canadian money-transfer firms scoring 15.4. Before you read it as a safety ranking, one point has to be clear: a FINTRAC registration is an anti-money-laundering formality, not permission to sell forex to Canadians.

What a FINTRAC registration actually is

FINTRAC registers money services businesses so they report suspicious transactions and meet anti-money-laundering rules. It does not vet leverage limits or how a firm holds client money, and it says nothing about whether that firm should be offering contracts for difference at all. In Canada the conduct role belongs to CIRO, the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization, and only a CIRO-regulated dealer can legally offer spot forex or CFDs to Canadian residents. WIKILIX classes FINTRAC as a tier-3, offshore-style registration for that reason. A broker can sit on this page, hold a valid FINTRAC number, and still not be authorised to take a Canadian retail forex client.

The nineteen, and how uneven the set is

The spread is wide. The median score across the group is 44.0, and only eight firms opened before 2010. The oldest by a long way is StoneX One, whose corporate roots run to 1866; the newest names, three firms registered since 2020, include two we have flagged. Seventeen of the nineteen hold at least two regulators in our records, but that number flatters the list. Eleven also carry a tier-1 conduct licence from an authority such as the FCA, ASIC or the NFA, while eight hold none, and six of those eight are flagged as offshore.

Who you will not find here

If you searched for regulated Canadian forex brokers, the names you were expecting, the CIRO-regulated dealers that can legally onboard Canadians, are mostly absent, because a CIRO seat is a different record from a FINTRAC number. Only five of the nineteen are even headquartered in Canada: Everforex, MTFX, KnightsbridgeFX, Olympia Trust and Regain Capital. The rest are domiciled anywhere from the United Kingdom to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines while still holding a Canadian anti-money-laundering registration. Leverage is the other tell. The three firms advertising 1:1000, QRS GLOBAL, Crystal Ball Markets and dbinvesting, all carry a flag in our data, either as a suspicious clone or an offshore operation.

What to check before you treat a FINTRAC number as reassurance

• If you are a Canadian resident trading forex or CFDs, confirm the firm also holds a CIRO seat; the FINTRAC number alone does not authorise that business.
• Read the registration for what it is, money-services and anti-money-laundering enrolment, not client-money segregation or a leverage cap.
• Check which legal entity holds the FINTRAC number, since a group can register one entity and route your account through another.
• Cross-check any firm flagged here as offshore or a suspicious clone on FINTRAC's own registry before you deposit.

Every figure here reflects licences recorded in the WIKILIX database as of today. Confirm any registration on FINTRAC's registry and any conduct licence on the relevant regulator's own register before you send money.