The word “regulated” on a broker’s website is just text on a page. The register that would prove it sits on the regulator’s own website, is free to search, and takes about five minutes to read properly. Here is exactly how.
Why “regulated” on a website proves nothing
Every claim a broker makes about itself lives on infrastructure the broker controls. The homepage, the licence badge in the footer, the PDF certificate, the “Regulation” page with a crest on it: all of that is published by the firm, about the firm. It is marketing until something outside the firm confirms it.
This is the same principle behind reading a track record. A screenshot of an equity curve is a claim. A third-party-tracked account on Myfxbook is a record you can inspect yourself. Regulation works identically: the claim lives on the broker’s site, the record lives on the regulator’s site. Only one of them is evidence.
The good news is that the record is public, free, and usually searchable in under a minute. Financial regulators in most major jurisdictions publish an online register of the firms and individuals they authorise. A register is simply a database of who is permitted to do what, kept by the body that grants the permission.
You do not need to be an expert to use one. You need three pieces of information and the discipline to type them yourself.
The four-step check
Do this before you deposit anything, with the firm that will actually hold your money. And hold every other party in the chain, including us, to the same standard: evidence you can check yourself, not claims you have to accept.
1. Find the legal entity name and the licence number
Scroll to the footer of the broker’s website. Regulated firms almost always state, in small print, the full registered company name, the jurisdiction, and a reference number. That reference number goes by different names depending on the regulator (licence number, registration number, firm reference number, authorisation number), but it is the key to the register.
Note the legal entity name, not the brand name. Brands and legal entities often differ, and a group may operate several entities in several jurisdictions with different permissions. The entity that will actually hold your money is the one that matters.
If a site claims regulation but publishes no entity name and no number, the check is already over. That absence is the answer.
2. Go to the regulator’s website yourself
This is the step people skip, and it is the step that does all the work.
Do not click the link the broker provides to “verify” its licence. Do not scan the QR code on the certificate. Open a new browser tab, search for the regulator by name, and confirm you are on its official domain before you search anything. A fake regulator website is trivially cheap to build, and a link from the firm being checked can point anywhere.
3. Search the register and read the whole entry
Search by the reference number first, then by the entity name. Do not stop at “a result came back.” Read the entry and compare it, field by field, against what the broker told you:
- Status. Is the authorisation current, or lapsed, withdrawn, or suspended? Registers usually show historic entries too, and a dead licence still returns a search result.
- Permitted activities. Registers list what the firm may actually do. A permission to give advice is not a permission to hold client money. A firm may be legitimately registered for something other than the service it is selling you.
- Contact details on file. Compare the registered address, website domain, and phone number in the register against the ones on the site you are looking at. Mismatches are the single most useful signal in the entire check; see the next section for why.
- Warnings and disciplinary history. Many regulators publish enforcement notices and public warning lists alongside the register. Search the entity name there too.
4. Check the warning lists, not just the register
A firm can be absent from the register and present on a warning list. Regulators publish lists of firms they have identified as operating without authorisation or impersonating authorised businesses. Searching a name against both is a two-minute job and catches cases the register alone would miss.
The clone-firm trap
This is the failure mode that catches careful people, so it deserves its own section.
A clone firm is a fraudulent operation that copies the details of a genuinely authorised business (its legal name, its registered address, its licence number) and presents them as its own. The scam is built to survive exactly the check described above. You look up the number, the register returns a real, active, well-established firm, and everything appears to match.
What the clone cannot copy is the contact details the genuine firm has filed with its regulator. So the details on the register are your control:
Never contact a firm using the details it gave you. Contact it using the details the register gave you.
In practice, that means: take the website domain, phone number, and email from the register entry, and use those to reach the firm and confirm the approach is genuine. If the register lists a domain and the site you were sent to differs by a word, a hyphen, or a top-level domain, you are almost certainly looking at a clone. The same applies to a payment instruction: a request to send funds to an account name that does not match the registered entity is a stop signal, regardless of how convincing the paperwork looks.
Not all regulation is the same thing
“Regulated” is a binary word describing something that is not binary. Jurisdictions differ substantially in what authorisation actually requires and what protections it brings, and a licence in one place is not equivalent to a licence in another.
Rather than ranking jurisdictions (the details change, and any specific claim here would age badly), find out what applies to your entity by reading the regulator’s own rules. In general terms, the questions that matter are:
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Is client money required to be segregated from the firm’s own funds? | Determines what happens to your balance if the firm fails. |
| Is there a compensation or investor protection scheme, and what is its limit? | Some jurisdictions have one; many do not. Limits vary widely. |
| Are there leverage caps or negative balance protection? | Directly affects how much you can lose on a single position. |
| Is there an independent complaints or ombudsman process? | Determines whether you have recourse beyond the firm itself. |
| Which entity is the client agreement actually with? | The protections that apply are the ones that apply to that entity, in its jurisdiction. |
That last row is where most confusion originates. A group may advertise a well-regarded licence in its marketing while onboarding clients from certain countries onto a different entity elsewhere in the group. Read the client agreement and check which entity name appears on it, then run the register check on that name.
Key takeaways
- A regulation claim on a firm’s own website is marketing. The register on the regulator’s website is the record.
- Get the legal entity name and reference number, then navigate to the regulator yourself, never through a link the firm supplied.
- Read the whole register entry: status, permitted activities, filed contact details, and any published warnings.
- Against clone firms, the register’s contact details are the control. Reach the firm using those, not the ones you were given.
- Confirm which entity your agreement is with, then check what protections that jurisdiction actually provides: segregation, compensation schemes, and complaints processes differ.
- Run this check on the broker that will hold your deposit, and hold every other party in the chain to the same evidentiary standard. Anyone who objects to being checked has told you something useful.
If this way of thinking is useful, the same discipline applies to performance claims. Verified vs Unverified Results: The Red Flags Checklist covers how to tell a real record from a rendered one, and How to Evaluate a Track Record Before You Allocate walks through what to examine once you have found a genuine one. For the wider question of separating the market from the marketing around it, see Is Forex a Scam?
This article is educational and is not financial, investment, or legal advice, and it is not a substitute for professional guidance or your own due diligence. It describes in general terms how public regulatory registers work; it does not state or imply the regulatory status of any specific firm, including Sterling Capital, and regulatory requirements and register contents change over time; always confirm current details directly with the relevant regulator. Any figures or examples used here are illustrative only. Trading foreign exchange and other leveraged instruments carries a substantial risk of loss, and you may lose more than your initial deposit. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Verify everything. Ourselves included.
Sterling Capital publishes third-party-tracked performance because a claim you can check is worth more than a claim you have to believe. Read the rest of the Insights library and hold every firm you deal with to the same standard.