How to Verify a Trading Platform's Licence in Five Minutes

Almost every trading platform displays something that looks like a regulatory credential: a badge in the footer, a licence number on the About page, a certificate image on a 'Security' tab. Almost none of it is evidence. A badge is a graphic file, a licence number is a string of text, and both can be typed by anyone. The only thing that establishes a permission is the regulator's own public register, and checking it takes about five minutes.

Step one: find the legal entity, not the brand

Brands and licence holders are frequently different things. The name on the website is a marketing brand; the thing that holds — or does not hold — a permission is a registered company. Open the platform's Terms and Conditions and look for the clause naming the entity you would be contracting with, together with its registration jurisdiction and number. It is usually in the first or last section. If the terms never name a company, that is your answer, and you can stop here.

Step two: search the regulator's register for that exact name

Every credible regulator publishes a searchable register of the firms it authorises. Go to the regulator's own website — typed directly, not reached through a link on the platform — and search for the entity name from the terms. Three outcomes are possible, and only one of them is good.

Step three: read what the permission actually covers

A live register entry is necessary but not sufficient. Registers state the scope of a permission, and scope is where most misleading claims live. A firm may be authorised for payment services but not for offering derivatives to retail clients. It may be authorised in a jurisdiction that does not include yours. It may hold a corporate registration — which is simply company formation and confers no financial oversight at all — presented as though it were a financial licence. Read the entry, not just its existence.

Step four: check the warning lists

The final check is the fastest and the one most people skip. National regulators publish investor-warning or unauthorised-firm lists naming operators they have found soliciting clients without permission. Searching your own country's list for the brand and the entity name takes under a minute. A warning entry for your jurisdiction settles the question regardless of what any register elsewhere says.

Why we publish blanks instead of guesses

This is the same procedure BedahBroker applies before recording a regulator on a review page, and it is why several of our platform records currently show no regulation data at all. When we cannot complete the check against a primary source, we record the field as undisclosed rather than repeating a claim we have not confirmed. An unverified licence number republished by a review site becomes evidence in the reader's mind, and that is precisely the harm the check exists to prevent.