FCA licence 194126

Partly, and the detail matters. The firm's terms commit to keeping client assets separate from its own and protected against its creditors, and Pareto is a member of the Norwegian Investor Compensation Scheme, which covers a maximum of NOK 200,000 per client. The terms state plainly that foreign exchange activities fall outside the scope of that scheme, and the UK entity separately discloses that it does not hold client money or safeguard client assets.

Self service onboarding is available to residents of Norway, Sweden and Finland, each through the local group entity and, in Norway and Sweden, using BankID. Everyone else is directed to contact their nearest office or their Pareto contact, so onboarding elsewhere is a manual process rather than a refusal. The firm publishes no list of restricted or prohibited countries.

It offers its own systems and does not provide MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5 or cTrader. Clients reach the service through the firm's online platform, which ranges from simple web pages to more advanced systems for active traders. Institutional clients can use direct market access with FIX connectivity, smart order routing and algorithmic execution.

Costs are charged as brokerage commission rather than as a dealing spread. The firm publishes separate costs and charges and price list documents for its Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish entities in the compliance section of its website, and the rates differ between them. No single headline commission rate is published.

No leverage figure is published. The firm does not market a leveraged margin trading product to retail clients, and its terms describe securities financing and credit facilities as services arranged individually rather than as a headline ratio. Treat any site quoting a specific Pareto Securities leverage figure with suspicion.

The firm does not publish one. There is no minimum deposit, account tier or funding table anywhere on the site, which is consistent with a relationship based investment bank rather than a self service trading platform. Anyone who needs a figure has to obtain it from a local office before committing.

The group is headed by Pareto Securities AS, an Oslo based company registered in Norway under number 956 632 374 with share capital of NOK 90,000,000. It forms part of the wider Pareto Group, which also includes Pareto Asset Management and Pareto Bank. Pareto Securities Limited in the United Kingdom is wholly owned by Pareto Securities AS.

Not in the retail sense. Pareto Securities is a full service investment bank whose brokerage desk covers equities, fixed income and foreign exchange for institutional clients. Its FCA record is limited to institutional customers and states that it does not authorise retail activities, so a private trader looking for a leveraged currency account is looking at the wrong type of firm.

No. The operating company is verifiable in Norway's official register under number 956 632 374, the UK subsidiary is verifiable at Companies House under number 03994976, and the FCA reference the firm publishes matches the licence record exactly. The real risk attached to this name is impersonation rather than the firm itself, because a warning has been published about an unauthorised operation presenting itself as the authorised Pareto Securities.

Yes. Pareto Securities Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority as a MiFID investment firm under reference 194126, and that authorisation is confirmed and in force. The firm also states that Pareto Securities AS is supervised by the Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway, Pareto Securities AB by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority and Pareto Securities Oy by the Financial Supervisory Authority of Finland. Those three Nordic authorisations are published without licence numbers and were not confirmed against the authorities' own registers in this review.