Reverse Solicitation

Reverse solicitation is the doctrine that a firm not licensed in your country may serve you if you approached it entirely on your own initiative, without any marketing directed at you. It is a narrow exemption in most regimes, and the burden of showing that it applies sits with the firm rather than with the client. It matters because it is the mechanism through which an offshore entity accepts clients from jurisdictions where it is not authorised, often via a checkbox in the onboarding flow attesting that you sought the firm out. Ticking that box does not make the exemption real, and it does shape what happens next: a relationship built on reverse solicitation typically sits outside your local regulator's protections, outside any compensation scheme, and outside the ombudsman or dispute route you would otherwise have had. Supervisors periodically warn that advertising, affiliate links and social-media promotion are incompatible with the claim — if you arrived through a promotion, you were solicited.