The company in this title is Japanese. It is not the Indian stockbroking arm of State Bank of India.
That distinction is not pedantry, because the three letters SBI sit on separate companies in separate countries under separate regulators, and a reader searching the name is quite likely to be looking for one while reading about the other. SBI Neomobile Securities Co., Ltd. is a Tokyo securities company registered with the Kanto Local Finance Bureau. SBICAP Securities Limited, which trades as SBI Securities, is a Mumbai company registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India. Neither answers for the other, and no complaint lodged with one regulator reaches the other company. This page keeps them apart, sets out what is verifiable about the Japanese entity, and then covers the Indian foreign exchange rules that most readers arriving at this name actually need. Checked on 15 September 2026.
The Japanese entity and what registration 3125 means
A registration number is the only reliable anchor when a brand is shared.
The legal name is SBI Neomobile Securities Co., Ltd., written in Japanese as 株式会社SBIネオモバイル証券. It holds registration number 3125 issued by the Kanto Local Finance Bureau, in the category of Type I Financial Instruments Business, dated 28 February 2019. In November 2021 it took a second registration, number 2, as a Financial Service Intermediary. Both numbers appear in the company's own statutory disclosure.
That disclosure is worth understanding before relying on it. Japanese securities firms must publish an annual statement of business and financial condition under Article 46-4 of the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, and make it available at every office and on the internet. The figures below come from the edition covering the financial year ending March 2023. It is a company document prepared to a statutory standard rather than a regulator's own register entry, and that difference matters. A statutory disclosure is strong evidence of what the company says about itself. It is not the same instrument as a licence record retrieved from the Financial Services Agency, and the two should be checked against each other rather than substituted for one another.
The company's own history section gives the sequence.
A preparation company was established in October 2018. Registration as a Type I Financial Instruments Business Operator followed in February 2019, the name changed to SBI Neomobile Securities in March 2019, and internet trading services began in April 2019. Foreign exchange margin trading under the name Neomobile FX was added in April 2020, covered warrants linked to the Nikkei average in January 2021, and the financial service intermediary registration in November 2021. As of the end of March 2023 the share register showed a single holder, SBI Financial Services Co., Ltd., with 2,575,000 shares, being 100 per cent. Directors listed at that date included Masato Takamura as chairman and Hiroyuki Ogawa as president.
The company states membership of the Japan Securities Dealers Association and the Financial Futures Association of Japan. Both bodies publish member directories, and both are checkable by a member of the public without an account.
The name collision with India
The Indian business most readers mean by SBI Securities is a different company with a different legal name. It is SBICAP Securities Limited, corporate identity number U65999MH2005PLC155485, registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India as a stockbroker under number INZ000200032, with depository participant registration IN-DP-314-2017 and research analyst registration INH000000602. Its exchange member codes are 10529 on the National Stock Exchange, 0095 on BSE and 56135 on the Multi Commodity Exchange, and its approved segments on the National Stock Exchange include equity, equity derivatives and currency derivatives. Its own website carries the line that the SBI logo belongs to State Bank of India and is used by SBICAP Securities Limited under licence, which is the cleanest possible statement that a brand licence is not a corporate relationship. A Japanese securities company registered with the Kanto Local Finance Bureau and an Indian broker registered with SEBI operate under different statutes, hold different capital, and are answerable to different supervisors.
What an Indian resident may actually trade
This is the section that matters if you are reading from India.
The Reserve Bank of India publishes a standing set of forex FAQs, updated as on 28 August 2024, and they are unusually direct. Resident persons are permitted to undertake forex transactions only with authorised persons and only for permitted purposes under the Foreign Exchange Management Act 1999. Transactions with unauthorised persons, or for purposes outside those permitted, expose the resident to penal action under the Act.
The rules then narrow further for anything conducted electronically. Permitted forex transactions executed electronically must be undertaken on an electronic trading platform authorised by the Reserve Bank, or on a recognised stock exchange, meaning the National Stock Exchange, BSE or the Metropolitan Stock Exchange. Residents are not permitted to trade forex on unauthorised electronic platforms, and doing so attracts the same penal consequence. Separately, the Reserve Bank maintains an Alert List naming entities that are neither authorised to deal in forex under FEMA nor authorised to operate such a platform, and it states plainly that the list is not exhaustive and that absence from it is not evidence of authorisation.
Seven currency pairs, and only seven, are available on exchange.
In a response published on 12 November 2021, the Reserve Bank set out that residents may enter into currency futures and options contracts in USD-INR, EUR-INR, GBP-INR, JPY-INR, EUR-USD, GBP-USD and USD-JPY on stock exchanges recognised by SEBI. The over-the-counter picture is different in an important way: foreign exchange derivative transactions involving the rupee may be undertaken only for hedging exchange rate risk on transactions permitted under FEMA, while transactions not involving the rupee may be undertaken for purposes other than hedging, and there is no restriction on currency pair in either case. The practical result is that a resident seeking to speculate on EUR-USD can do so on an Indian exchange within the listed pairs, but cannot simply open an account with an overseas broker and remit margin.
The funding route is closed off explicitly, which is the part most often missed.
Asked directly whether a resident individual may remit margin overseas under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme for online forex trading, the Reserve Bank answers no. Remittances under the scheme are permitted only for permissible current and capital account transactions, and remittances for margins or margin calls to overseas exchanges or overseas counterparties are not allowed under it. The same FAQ set directs complaints about unauthorised platforms to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal and to the Enforcement Directorate, which holds investigation, search, seizure and adjudication powers under section 37 of FEMA.
Set against that, the Neomobile FX service described above is a product offered by a Japanese firm to clients in Japan under Japanese rules. It is not a compliant route for an Indian resident, irrespective of how well regulated the Japanese entity is.
Resident and non-resident are different legal categories
FEMA does not treat residency as a detail. It treats it as the dividing line.
The Foreign Exchange Management (Foreign Exchange Derivative Contracts) Regulations, 2000, issued as notification FEMA 25 on 3 May 2000, split permissions in two. Regulation 4 covers a person resident in India and points to Schedule I. Regulation 5 covers a person resident outside India and points to Schedule II. A Reserve Bank report on currency futures describes the second category as including Foreign Institutional Investors, persons resident outside India holding foreign direct investment in India, and non-resident Indians. Each schedule specifies its own permitted products and its own permitted purposes, and in the hedging context both require a crystallised underlying exposure, meaning an actual foreign exchange risk that exists rather than one that might arise. An NRI is therefore not simply a resident with a foreign address. The permissions available, the products that may be used and the purposes for which they may be used are set out in a different schedule, and the distinction has been in the regulations since 2000.
I am not going to list which specific contracts an NRI may trade, because I could not verify each item against the current schedules and a wrong list here would be worse than none. The framework above is verifiable and the schedules themselves are public.
Clone and lookalike risk
Some broker rating sites tag this entity with labels such as suspicious regulatory licence and possible clone. Those are the opinions of commercial rating sites, not findings by the Financial Services Agency or by SEBI, and I am not repeating them as fact. What I did find is a registration number, a registration date, a category, two association memberships and a named parent, all published by the company under a statutory obligation. What I did not find is any warning naming this entity issued by a regulator. The correct response to that combination is not to trust either the rating site or this page, but to open the Financial Services Agency register of licensed financial instruments business operators, type in 3125, and confirm that the returned legal name matches character for character. If it does, the licence question is settled. If it does not, no amount of reassuring prose anywhere else changes the answer.
How to verify any of this yourself
- Search the Financial Services Agency register of licensed financial instruments business operators for Kanto Local Finance Bureau number 3125 and confirm the legal name returned is SBI Neomobile Securities Co., Ltd.
- Check the same register for financial service intermediary registration number 2 and confirm it attaches to the same company.
- Search the Japan Securities Dealers Association member directory and the Financial Futures Association of Japan member directory for the company name.
- Retrieve the company's most recent statement of business and financial condition under Article 46-4 and read the registration and shareholder sections yourself, rather than relying on the 2023 edition quoted here.
- For the Indian company, check SEBI registration INZ000200032 against the SEBI list of registered stock brokers and confirm the name reads SBICAP Securities Limited.
- Confirm exchange membership by checking member code 10529 on the National Stock Exchange and code 0095 on BSE, and verify that the currency derivatives segment is enabled on your account.
- If you are resident in India, read the Reserve Bank's list of authorised persons and its list of authorised electronic trading platforms before evaluating any forex provider.
- Read the seven permitted currency pairs above and treat any provider offering pairs outside that list to an Indian resident as a signal to stop and check the Alert List.
What I could not verify
- The current corporate status of SBI Neomobile Securities Co., Ltd. Some sources describe a merger into another SBI group company, and I could not confirm that from a primary source, so I make no claim about it.
- Whether Neomobile FX is still offered, and on what terms. The service launch date comes from the company's 2023 disclosure and may no longer be current.
- Current fees, spreads, leverage and account minimums, none of which I could verify against a primary source.
- The retail leverage cap applying to Japanese forex margin trading. I did not retrieve it from the Financial Services Agency or from the Financial Futures Association of Japan, so I am not stating a figure.
- Whether the company accepts clients resident outside Japan.
- Whether any regulator has taken enforcement action against either company named here. I found no public record of any and make no claim either way.
Where that leaves it
Registration 3125 is real, dated and checkable, and it covers a securities business conducted in Japan under Japanese supervision. It says nothing about a Mumbai brokerage, and it does not create a lawful route for an Indian resident to trade forex through an overseas platform.
Three separate questions get collapsed into one whenever this name is searched.
Which company you are dealing with, which regulator supervises that company, and what your own country of residence permits you to do. Each has a different answer and each is answerable from a public register. Establish the first two before funding anything, and the third before choosing a venue at all.