Exness

The licence in the marketing is not the licence you get

Exness holds four licences and puts the British one first. Exness (UK) Ltd is genuinely authorised by the FCA under firm reference 730729, and the FCA is as serious as regulators get — it is one of the few that stands behind a compensation scheme. The question nobody asks is what that company does.

It files its accounts at Companies House like any other British company, and they answer it. The strategic report for the year to 31 December 2024 describes a firm working through "compliance requirements arising from the growth of its B2B and liquidity provision business", and notes that it "has increased its onboarding of B2B clients during 2024" 1. B2B. Not traders — other firms.

And then there is note 21, which settles it without any interpretation at all. "As at the year end the company held client monies in segregated client accounts equivalent to $2,473,493 (2023: $50,275)" 1. Two and a half million dollars. In the same period the group was reporting monthly trading volume of $3.86 trillion across 836,873 active traders 6. Whatever those traders are, they are not clients of the company with the FCA licence.

So the entity map on this page shows that licence greyed out, with no country against it. It is not a demotion and it is not an accusation — the company is real, profitable and well capitalised. It is simply not yours, and a page that listed it next to "FSCS up to £85,000" for a British reader would be describing a protection that reader cannot have. Ours did, until this research. That is the whole reason the entity map exists.

Where you do end up

Three companies take retail clients. Exness (Cy) Ltd holds CySEC 178/12 and covers the EU — we read that entry off the CySEC register ourselves the day this was written, and it is active 3. Exness ZA (Pty) Ltd holds FSCA licence 51024 and covers South Africa; the group added an over-the-counter derivative provider licence there in August 2024, which is the permission South Africa requires specifically for CFDs 8.

Everyone else — which is most of the world, and every reader outside those two blocks — is onboarded to Exness (SC) Ltd in Seychelles, licence SD025, a company that until 2021 was called Nymstar Limited. Seychelles registers firms rather than supervising them closely and runs no compensation scheme. That is the trade Exness offers, and it is a real one: the leverage and the entry price that make the broker attractive are things a tier-1 regulator would not let a retail client near.

It is worth saying plainly that Exness is not unusual in this. Almost every broker in this ranking has the same shape. What is unusual is the size of the gap between the company on the homepage and the company on the client agreement.

What the filings say about the group

Exness does not publish audited group accounts, so the British subsidiary is the only part of the business anyone outside it can read. It is worth reading anyway.

Revenue there grew from $5.25m to $7.66m in 2024, profit before tax from $4.53m to $7.77m, and net assets stood at $97.7m at the year end 1. The shareholders put in another $25m of share capital in January 2024 1, and a further allotment in December 2025 took called-up capital to about $140m 2. That is a lot of money to leave sitting in a B2B arm, and it is the most concrete evidence available that the group intends to do something larger with its European footprint than it does today.

One line in the notes is worth more than the rest for anyone weighing counterparty risk: "During the year under review, there was no single ultimate controlling party" 1. Exness is private, founded in 2008, and has never had to name a controlling shareholder to anyone. There is no annual report, no exchange filing and no rating. The four licences are the only outside check on it that exists, which is why which one covers you is not a detail.

Where the cost figures on this page come from

Everything above was read from a document: a filing at Companies House, a regulator’s register, a regulator’s own warning list. The trading figures could not be, because Exness blocks our servers — every request to exness.com, to the regional sites and to the help centre comes back 403, a door closed to datacentre traffic rather than a page we misread. So the cost, minimum deposit and withdrawal figures here were read by a person off the broker’s published pages, and the date beside them says when.

It matters because the published numbers are contested. A review desk that tests accounts rather than reading brochures puts the minimum on the professional account types at $1,000 and on Standard at $100 7, where the figure Exness advertises in most markets is far lower. WikiFX, which maintains its own listing and is the largest directory in this business, declines to give a single number at all: it records that the minimum "may vary based on your payment method or geographical location" 10. Three readings, no contradiction — the minimum is set per entity and per region, and the one you see depends on which company is onboarding you, which is the point the rest of this page has been making. Until someone here has opened an account and looked, we publish the broker’s figure and say where it came from.

That WikiFX listing is worth reading for a second reason. It puts the same four licences against the same four companies with the same four numbers we read off the registers ourselves 10, which is the check we wanted and could not get from the broker. It also scores the broker 8.29 out of 10, and we have not adopted that figure or let it near ours — our number is built from the weights published on the methodology page and from nothing else, which is the only way a score means anything. Two organisations reading the same registers and reaching similar conclusions separately is evidence. One copying the other is not.

The same caution applies to the leverage headline. "Unlimited" is the group’s best-known claim and it is conditional — on the account type, the platform, how much equity is in the account, and what the calendar is doing. We have not been able to read those conditions from the source, so this page carries the 1:2000 cap that applies broadly and does not repeat thresholds we cannot stand behind.

Four more listings carry this broker’s name, and are not this broker

Search the WikiFX directory for Exness and five records come back. One is the broker described on this page, scored 8.29. The other four score between 1.27 and 1.83, hold no verified licence between them, and are filed under other domains entirely — exness-chinese.com against a Canadian registration, exchinaclub.com against another 10. They are not subsidiaries and they are not the group; they are businesses using a known name, and a reader who lands on one of them has not made a small mistake.

This is the ordinary hazard of a large retail brand, and it is the reason every entity on this page is named in full with its licence number attached. A licence number is checkable in ten seconds on a register and a logo is not. If the company named on the agreement you are about to sign is not one of the four in the map above, nothing on this page applies to it.

Japan warned the company you are most likely to sign with

The Japanese Financial Services Agency publishes a list of firms it has sent a warning letter to for doing regulated business in Japan without registration. On it, warned by the Kanto Local Finance Bureau on 21 April 2023, is Nymstar Limited of F20, 1st floor, Eden Plaza, Eden Island, Seychelles, for "soliciting over-the-counter derivative transactions through the internet". The entry carries a note in the remarks column that removes any doubt about who is meant: 「当該業者が提供するサービスの名称は「Exness」である」 — the name of the service this operator provides is "Exness" 5.

Nymstar Limited is Exness (SC) Ltd. The global legal entity register carries NYMSTAR LIMITED as the previous legal name of EXNESS (SC) LTD, at the same F20, 1st Floor Eden Plaza address, under LEI 8945006P9TS9D3LXTE70 4. That is the Seychelles company, licence SD025, that every reader outside the EU and South Africa is onboarded to. Not a clone, not a lookalike, not a lapsed shell — the company on the client agreement.

Now the proportion, because it cuts both ways. This is a market-access warning, not a finding about client money, and the two should never be filed together. Japan caps retail forex leverage at 25:1 and registers no offshore broker that will not live inside that cap, so almost every large offshore CFD firm is either on this list or absent from Japan; the warning says the company solicited Japanese residents without a Japanese licence and says nothing at all about whether it pays people out. It is also not nothing. A regulator wrote the group’s trading name into a public warning and left it there, which is more than most of this directory has against it, and it is on the record here at the weight the methodology page sets rather than at the weight an argument would like.

One detail is worth stating precisely because of how easily it is misread. Four other warned firms on that same list give the same Eden Plaza address, and the FSA writes beside each of them that 「当該業者との関係性は不明」 — the relationship with that operator is unknown 5. So we say what the regulator says. Eden Plaza is a company-formation address shared by a great many Seychelles licensees, a shared registered agent is not a shared owner, and we are not going to imply one.

And what else we looked for

The Philippine SEC named Exness Global Limited and its trading app among platforms letting Filipinos "create user accounts on their platform for the purpose of investing and trading unregistered investment products", reported on 8 January 2026 9. The same shape as the Japanese warning and the same weight: a licensing advisory about a market the group is not licensed in. We could not read the SEC’s own document — its website refuses our requests as Exness’s does — so this one rests on the reporting, and the sources list says so rather than dressing a newspaper up as a regulator.

Beyond those two we looked and did not find. No CySEC settlement or administrative penalty against Exness (Cy) Ltd came up in the searches we ran, no FCA action against the British entity, and that entity has filed clean audited accounts every year since 2019 2. "We found nothing" is not the same as "there is nothing", and it is the strongest thing we are willing to say.