Is My Broker Safe?

Exness is a legitimate, heavily regulated broker group — including a genuine FSCA licence in its own name for South Africans and a CMA licence in Kenya. The care point is entity routing: which Exness company your account opens with decides which regulator protects you.

XM (Trading Point group, since 2009) is a genuinely licensed multi-entity broker — including an FSCA licence in its own name for South Africans. Two things belong in the open: most non-SA African clients get the Belize entity, and Singapore’s regulator blocked xm.com in 2025 for unlicensed marketing there.

FxPro is a long-established broker with one of the cleaner entity structures we’ve verified: an FSCA licence held in its own name (FSP 45052) plus FCA, CySEC and DFSA group licences. No regulator actions surfaced in our checks.

HFM (formerly HotForex) is a genuinely multi-licensed group including FSCA coverage in South Africa and a CMA licence in Kenya — one of only a handful of international brokers holding BOTH core African licences. Entity routing still decides your protection.

BrokerToolsHub removed Octa from all its rankings in July 2026. Our investigation found the "South Africa licence" number displayed on Octa’s website belongs to a different company, and two national regulators took action against the platform in 2025. Whatever its app quality, we cannot describe money held under this structure as protected.

Banxso no longer operates. The FSCA withdrew its licence (provisionally October 2024, finally July 2025), the Western Cape High Court placed it in final liquidation on 2 March 2026 after finding it "factually and commercially hopelessly insolvent", and the FSCA fined its owner and a former director a record R2 billion. More than 7,000 investors are creditors in the liquidation.

The FSCA provisionally withdrew Mixirite’s FSP licence in June 2026 amid concerns over its sales practices. Our investigation links its operating pattern to the same playbook as Banxso and AfriMarkets. We recommend against depositing.

Vault Markets holds no FSCA licence in its own name: it presents itself as a juristic representative operating under another company’s FSP licence (RocketX, FSP 52142, per its own site disclosures). That structure is legal but materially weaker than direct licensing — the licence holder, not the platform, answers to the regulator.

Deriv is a real, long-established company (operating since 1999, formerly Binary.com) — not a fly-by-night scam. But African clients are served entirely by offshore Tier-3 entities, and its famous synthetic indices are markets Deriv itself generates and takes the other side of. You can trade it legitimately; you should understand exactly what it is first.

JustMarkets is a real broker with a real FSCA-licensed South African entity — but that local entity acts only as an intermediary under the FAIS Act, while client accounts are opened with its offshore entities. "FSCA-regulated" is technically present and practically misleading: your money’s protection is offshore-grade.