Exness is a real, licensed broker group. That sentence is worth stating plainly, because a great deal of content about it goes the other way.
Founded in 2008, the brand operates through at least eight licensed companies spread across Seychelles, Cyprus, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Curaçao, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Jordan. Which of them opens your account is decided by your country of residence, and the gap between them is not cosmetic. Two of the strongest licences in the group belong to companies that Exness itself states do not serve retail clients, which means the licence most often quoted in marketing material is frequently not the one governing a retail account. This page separates what appears on regulator registers from what appears only on company pages, and it treats the two differently. Checked on 15 September 2026.
Eight entities, one brand
A licence number printed on a website is a claim. The same number on a regulator's register, matched to an identical legal name, is evidence.
Below, two entries are confirmed against the regulator's own register and the remaining six are reproduced as the company states them, marked as such. I did not open each of the six registers individually.
| Legal entity | Regulator | Licence or reference | Status of my check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exness (UK) Ltd | Financial Conduct Authority, United Kingdom | Firm reference 730729 | Confirmed on the FCA register. Company number 08861481, 107 Cheapside, London EC2V 6DN, authorised since 1 September 2016 |
| Exness (Cy) Ltd | Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission | 178/12 | Confirmed on the CySEC register. Company registration 293057, 1 Siafi Street, Porto Bello, Office 401, CY-3042 Limassol, licence dated 5 September 2012 |
| Exness ZA (Pty) Ltd | Financial Sector Conduct Authority, South Africa | FSP 51024 | Stated by the company. Registration 2020/234138/07; acts solely as an intermediary under the FAIS Act |
| Exness (SC) Ltd | Financial Services Authority, Seychelles | SD025 | Stated by the company. Also authorised as an ODP by the FSCA in South Africa |
| Exness (VG) Ltd | Financial Services Commission, British Virgin Islands | SIBA/L/20/1133 | Stated by the company |
| Exness B.V. | Central Bank of Curaçao and Sint Maarten | 0003LSI | Stated by the company |
| Exness (KE) Limited | Capital Markets Authority, Kenya | 162 | Stated by the company. Registration PVT-LRUDJJB |
| Exness Limited Jordan Ltd | Jordan Securities Commission | Registration 51905 | Stated by the company |
The two confirmed entries are worth dwelling on, because they show what a register lookup actually returns. The FCA entry for Exness (UK) Ltd gives a firm reference number, a company number, a street address in the City of London and an authorisation date, and it names a complaints contact. The CySEC entry for Exness (Cy) Ltd gives a licence number, a company registration number, a postal address in Limassol, a licence date, and the specific investment services and ancillary services the firm is permitted to perform. Both registers let you type the number in yourself and see the same thing, which is the whole point. A regulator's register is designed to be checked by a member of the public, and neither of these requires an account, a payment or a login.
Note what the CySEC entry also tells you: the firm is permitted to provide services to countries outside the European Union, subject to local law.
That permission is the structural reason the group maintains so many entities. A Cyprus Investment Firm can reach non-EU clients, but the protections attached to a CySEC licence are protections that Cyprus and the European Union created for their own framework. Seychelles, Curaçao and the British Virgin Islands maintain separate registers with separate rules, and those rules were not written to mirror MiFID II.
So the list above is not a scoreboard. Reading it as one, and concluding that eight licences means eight times the safety, is the single most common error made about this broker.
The entity that opens your account
Exness states on its own regulation pages that Exness (UK) Ltd operates the domain exness.uk and does not offer services to retail clients, and that Exness (Cy) Ltd operates exness.eu and also does not offer services to retail clients. Those two companies hold the FCA and CySEC licences. A retail applicant is therefore not onboarded under either of them. Where a retail applicant does land is determined by residence, and for much of Africa, Asia and Latin America the company's own material points to Exness (SC) Ltd under the Seychelles licence SD025, with Exness B.V. in Curaçao and Exness (VG) Ltd in the British Virgin Islands serving selected regions. Your client agreement, not the logo on the homepage, is the document that names the entity, and it is the only place the answer is binding.
What a Seychelles licence does not give you
Two protections are worth naming precisely, because they exist on one part of this group and not another.
CySEC firms participate in the Investor Compensation Fund, which covers eligible retail claims up to 20,000 euros per client if the firm fails. FCA firms are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme up to 85,000 pounds. Both figures are scheme limits set by the regulator, not promises made by Exness, and neither covers trading losses.
Seychelles operates no equivalent compensation scheme for clients of Exness (SC) Ltd. The Seychelles Financial Services Authority issues the licence and supervises conduct under its own framework, and that framework does not include a statutory investor compensation fund, a leverage cap of the kind the European Securities and Markets Authority imposed across the European Union, or a dedicated ombudsman to which a client can escalate a dispute at no cost. Fund segregation and negative balance protection are commonly described as applying to clients of offshore entities, and they are meaningful, but they are not the same instrument as a compensation scheme. Segregation protects your money from the firm's creditors in an insolvency. A compensation scheme pays you when segregation was not enough. Only one of those two backstops exists under SD025.
The leverage difference follows from the same split.
Under the ESMA framework applied by CySEC, retail leverage on major currency pairs is capped at 1:30, and that cap is a regulatory ceiling rather than a commercial choice. Outside that framework, the group advertises leverage far above it, with figures up to 1:2000 appearing in its marketing for some entities and regions. I could not verify the current cap applying to any specific country, so I am not giving one. The relevant point is structural: where a leverage cap exists, it exists because a regulator imposed it, and where no cap exists the limit on your position size is the firm's own risk setting, which it may change.
Put concretely, if your account sits with Exness (SC) Ltd and the company becomes insolvent, there is no statutory fund that pays you, no ombudsman that hears your complaint at public expense, and no leverage ceiling that constrained how large a position you were permitted to open. That is not an accusation. It is what an offshore licence is.
It is also not unique to this broker. Most retail forex groups use the same architecture: a strong licence for institutional or professional flow, and an offshore licence for everyone else. Judging Exness for it while ignoring identical structures elsewhere would be dishonest, and ignoring it because everyone does it would be equally so.
RBI put Exness on its Alert List
Here is the part that almost no review of this broker mentions.
The Reserve Bank of India maintains an Alert List, updated as on 19 November 2025, of entities that are neither authorised to deal in forex under the Foreign Exchange Management Act 1999 nor authorised to operate an electronic trading platform for forex transactions under the Master Direction on Electronic Trading Platforms dated 16 June 2025. Exness appears on it at serial number 6, against the domain exness.com. The list also covers entities that appear to promote unauthorised platforms, and the Reserve Bank states explicitly that the list is not exhaustive and that an entity absent from it should not be assumed to be authorised. In its published forex FAQs, the Reserve Bank states that resident persons may undertake forex transactions only with authorised persons and for permitted purposes, that electronic forex trading must occur on platforms it has authorised or on the National Stock Exchange, BSE or Metropolitan Stock Exchange, and that remittances under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme may not be used to send margin overseas for online forex trading. Residents who transact on unauthorised platforms are stated to be liable to penal action under FEMA. Complaints may be filed on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal or with the Enforcement Directorate.
None of that is a finding of fraud. It is a jurisdictional finding: within India's exchange control framework, this platform is not an authorised channel.
Clone firms and near-name impersonators
Search results for this broker are noisy in a specific way. Comparison sites routinely list it as directly regulated by authorities including CONSOB in Italy, BaFin in Germany and the AFM in the Netherlands, which conflates European passporting notifications with direct authorisation, and which is not how those registers work. I searched for warnings naming Exness issued by the FCA, CONSOB, BaFin and ASIC and found none, so I am not asserting that any exists; absence of a found record is not evidence of absence. What protects you is not a warning list, it is matching fields. If someone contacts you claiming to represent Exness, compare the legal name, the firm reference number, the company number and the registered address against the register entry. The FCA record for Exness (UK) Ltd gives reference 730729 and company number 08861481 at 107 Cheapside, London. A different company number on an identical brand is a clone, and clone firms are the most common fraud bearing a real broker's name.
How to check any of this yourself
- Search the FCA register for firm reference 730729 and confirm it returns Exness (UK) Ltd at 107 Cheapside with company number 08861481.
- Open the CySEC entity page for licence 178/12 and confirm it returns Exness (Cy) Ltd with company registration 293057 and a Limassol address.
- Search the FSCA register for FSP 51024 and confirm the name reads Exness ZA (Pty) Ltd, then read the licence conditions attached to it.
- Search the Seychelles Financial Services Authority register for SD025 and read what the licence category permits.
- Check SIBA/L/20/1133 against the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission register and 0003LSI against the Central Bank of Curaçao and Sint Maarten.
- Check licence 162 against the Capital Markets Authority register in Kenya if you are a Kenyan resident.
- If you are resident in India, read the Reserve Bank's Alert List, its list of authorised persons and its list of authorised electronic trading platforms before anything else.
- Read the client agreement you are actually asked to sign and find the legal entity named on the first page. That name, not the brand, determines which regulator supervises your account.
What I could not verify
- Current minimum deposit, spreads, commissions and swap rates. These vary by entity, account type and region, and change frequently.
- Current maximum leverage for any specific country of residence, since the figure depends on the entity assigned to you.
- Withdrawal processing times and any fees attached, as published service levels differ across entities and payment rails.
- Which entity serves which country at the time you read this. Onboarding arrangements change and I did not verify a current mapping.
- Whether the Seychelles, Curaçao, British Virgin Islands, Kenyan and Jordanian licence records are current. I reproduced them from company disclosures without checking each register.
- Whether any regulator has imposed an enforcement penalty on any Exness entity. I found no public record of one and make no claim either way.
Where that leaves it
Exness holds real licences from real regulators, and two of them can be confirmed in under a minute on the regulators' own websites. It is also true that the licences most often quoted in its marketing belong to companies that do not take retail clients, and that the Reserve Bank of India lists the brand among platforms unauthorised for Indian residents.
Both of those things are true at once.
What you do with that depends on a fact only you can establish: the legal name printed on the agreement you sign. Find it before you fund anything, then look that name up rather than the brand. Everything above follows from which one it turns out to be.