Top 10 FSCA Regulated Brokers by WIKILIX Score

Ten brokers, ordered by the WIKILIX score, drawn from the 56 in our database that hold a licence recorded against South Africa's Financial Sector Conduct Authority and score 50 or higher. The spread across the ten is wide: HoxtonWealth sits at 80 and tenth-placed SuperForex at 61.8, against a median of 57.3 across the whole qualifying pool. Four of those 56 firms are South African companies. The other 52 hold an FSCA licence and are headquartered somewhere else.

How this ranking was built

One query produced the pool: every broker holding an FSCA licence with a score of 50 or above. That returned 56 firms. From those we dropped the 14 carrying a status label other than a clean one, then took the ten highest scores and left them in that order. The order is the score, descending. Nothing else decides it.

The WIKILIX score is built from what we hold on record about a firm: the licences recorded against it, how long it has been operating, how complete its regulatory and company detail is, and the status label our researchers have applied. It is not a review. It does not measure execution quality and it says nothing about what a trade will cost you.

Two figures from the pool are worth carrying into the list. Forty-eight of the 56 also hold a licence from at least one tier-1 authority, the FCA, ASIC, MAS or CNMV in these records, so an FSCA licence is rarely the only thing standing behind one of these firms. Nineteen hold licences from five or more authorities, and FXTIME and SuperForex each carry nine.

Why the FSCA sits in tier two

WIKILIX classifies the Financial Sector Conduct Authority as a tier-2 authority. Tier two is not a warning. It describes a regulator with a public register and real enforcement powers, but without the retail compensation arrangements and the leverage ceiling that define the tier-1 regimes. The leverage recorded across this pool makes that concrete: it runs from 1:1 to 1:5000, and six of the ten above are recorded at 1:500 or higher. An FCA-regulated retail account is capped at 1:30.

An FSCA licence does not make a broker South African

This is the part sorting cannot fix. Only four of the 56 qualifying firms are headquartered in South Africa, and two of them, Avior and Duo Markets, are on this list. IG has a recorded opening date of 1974 and is a UK company. Exness and FXTIME are domiciled in Cyprus, Velocity Trade in Australia, SuperForex in Belize. An FSCA licence tells you a firm may provide financial services in South Africa. It does not tell you the firm is South African, and it does not tell you the entity you sign with is the licensed one.

Fourteen firms in the wider pool carry a label we would not put under a ranking like this: ten recorded as suspicious clones, three flagged offshore and one recorded as exceeding its licence. None of the ten above carries one. That is why the list stops at SuperForex on 61.8 rather than following the raw score order down.

Before you open an account

• Search the FSCA register for the FSP number the broker publishes, and check the name on it matches the entity in the client agreement.
• Read which company you are contracting with. A group can hold the FSCA licence in one entity and take deposits in another.
• Compare the leverage the account offers against what the licence it is opened under permits.
• Confirm whether the firm accepts clients from where you live. No licence on this page settles that question.

What this list leaves out: spreads, commissions, execution speed, withdrawal times and platform quality. We hold no spread data, so none of it feeds the score and none of it is ranked here.