Guides

Your Broker Must Be Licensed: Which Government Agencies Can I Trust?

This list will Guide you in identifying which financial regulators and licensing authorities are dependable, and which, by omission, may be not be

The governments of all major industrialized countries have financial regulatory agencies there to protect its citizens. They are subject to extensive executive, judicial, legislative, and public oversight that license brokerages and brokers and monitor their activities to ensure maximum protection.

The most respected of these include:

The Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC)
Austria’s Financial Market Authority (Finanz markt auf sichtsbehörd, FMA)
The various provincial authorities in Canada, the most prominent being the Ontario Securities Commission, the Autorité des marchés financiers in Quebec, the British Columbia Securities Commission, and the Alberta Securities Commission
France’s Financial Markets Regulator, Autorité des marchés financiers, AMF)
Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht,BaFin)
The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC)
The Central Bank of Ireland
The Israel Securities Authority (ISA)
Italy’s National Securities and Exchange Commission (Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa, CONSOB)
Japan’s Financial Services Agency (金融庁 Kin’yū-chō)
Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF)
The Netherlands Authority for Financial Markets (Autoriteit Financiële Markten, AFM)
New Zealand’sFinancial Markets Authority (FMA)
The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway (Finanstilsynet)
Poland’s Financial Supervision Authority (Komisja Nadzoru Finansowego,PFOC)
Portugal’s Securities Market Commission (Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários, CMVM)
Romania’s Financial Supervisory Authority
The Central Bank of Russia
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)
South Africa’s Financial Services Board (FSB)
Spain’s National Securities Market Commission (Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores, CNMV)
Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority (Finansinspektionen)
Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA)
Turkey’s Capital Markets Board (Sermaye Piyasası Kurulu, CMB)
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)

Beware the Ineffective and Non-Existent Regulators

Alert consumers should beware, however, that weak bodies calling themselves regulatory commissions may also exist in the offshore countries in which firms committing binary options fraud and binary options scams are nominally incorporated. Due to the limited governmental infrastructure in these countries – which tend to be underpopulated and under-financed – the capacity of such agencies to carry out its monitoring function is nominal at best and non-existent at worst.