VFSC Regulated Brokers: 29 of 77 With a Clean Status Label

Twenty-nine of the 77 brokers whose WIKILIX records list a Vanuatu Financial Services Commission licence also carry our clean regulation status label, and those 29 are the grid below. The other 48 carry a different label. They are broken out further down rather than quietly dropped, because which VFSC records look clean and which do not is the whole question a reader arrives with.

Scores across the 29 run from 17.9 to 72.5, with a median of 49.9. Eight opened before 2010, and the two oldest both record an opening date in 1990: Hantec Bullion Investment Limited and Hantec Markets (V) Company Limited. Interactive Brokers Hong Kong Limited leads on 72.5, with eleven authorities recorded against it, among them the FCA, ASIC, the SFC and CIRO. Vantage Global Prime, on 60.5, holds ASIC, FCA, CIMA and FSCA entries alongside its Vanuatu one. Four firms hold nothing else at all: Oriental Wealth Markets, Autu Securities, xDirect and BazaarFx.

What the 77 VFSC records contain

Those labels are ours. They describe the state of the record we hold, and every one of the 48 still has its own page in the directory with the label shown.

How we built this list

The query is two conditions. A broker's licence records have to include a VFSC entry, and its status field has to read regulation. Order is the WIKILIX score, highest first. Nothing was picked by hand, so a firm that gains a Vanuatu licence, or loses its clean label, moves in or out without anyone editing this page.

Two limits of that query are worth spelling out. It does not read the licence number, and it does not read the licence class, so a Financial Dealer Licence and any other category of VFSC authorisation sit side by side here. Confirm the entry on the VFSC register before you rely on it.

What a Vanuatu licence tells you

WIKILIX classifies the VFSC as tier 4, the lowest of the four tiers we record, and as offshore. That is a description of the supervisory regime, not a judgement about any firm on this page. It also explains why so few of these brokers rely on Vanuatu alone. 25 of the 29 hold at least one licence from another authority, and 20 hold one from a tier-1 authority such as the FCA, ASIC, the SFC, MAS, FINRA, CIRO or BaFin. Fifteen hold an ASIC entry and nine hold an FCA entry.

Leverage is where the regimes visibly diverge. The median maximum leverage recorded across these 29 firms is 1:500, nine of them record 1:1000, and one, The Access Bank UK Limited, records no leverage at all.

Where these brokers are actually based

Only 7 of the 29 are headquartered in Vanuatu, among them DTT VAN LTD, which trades as Global DTT, and Decode Global Limited. Six are in Australia, four in the United Kingdom, three in Hong Kong, and the rest sit across Cyprus, Singapore, Belize, Seychelles, Mauritius, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and Costa Rica. A licence and a head office are separate facts in this database. Neither one tells you which clients a firm will accept.

Before you open an account

• Look up the licence number on the VFSC register and check that the company name there matches the entity named in the client agreement.
• Work out which entity you would contract with. Several firms here run a Vanuatu entity alongside an ASIC or FCA one, and the protections are not the same.
• Read what the second licence actually covers. A tier-1 entry against a group does not mean your account sits under it.
• Compare the maximum leverage recorded here against what the firm offers you, and ask which entity is offering it.

What this page cannot tell you: spreads, commissions, withdrawal times, execution quality, or whether a firm will accept a client resident where you are. None of that sits in the records this list is built from.