How to Read a Regulator's Public Register
Every credible authority publishes a searchable register of licensed firms. What an entry contains, which fields decide whether it covers you, and the traps.
A badge on a website is a claim, not evidence
Almost every trading site carries a regulator's name somewhere in the footer, often beside an authority's logo and a reference number. None of that is verification. The logo is an image the firm chose to place there, the number is text it typed, and both sit on a page the firm controls. Verification means finding the same claim in a database the firm does not control: the authority's own public register.
Find the register, not a link to it
Major financial authorities publish a searchable register of the firms and individuals they licence, and that register is the legal record of who is permitted to do what. Reach it by going to the authority's own domain directly rather than by following a link from the firm's site, which can point anywhere. If a jurisdiction is named in a firm's marketing and no public register for it can be found at all, that absence is itself the finding.
Search the legal entity, not the brand
A retail trading brand and the company behind it are frequently not the same name. Registers are organised by legal entity, so a brand can return nothing while the operating company returns a full record. The entity name appears in the client agreement and usually in the website footer beside a company number and a registered address — search that. Where a register keeps a "trading names" or "trading as" section, a legitimate brand should appear there, attached to the entity.
The fields that decide whether the licence covers you
An entry existing is only the first answer. Read the status — authorised, restricted, suspended, withdrawn — and the dates the permission has been in force. Read the permissions themselves, because a licence is granted for named activities, and a firm authorised to advise is not thereby authorised to hold client money or to deal on its own account. Read the registered address and the jurisdiction: the entity a client contracts with determines which rulebook and which compensation arrangements apply, and one group can hold licences in several places offering very different protection.
What a register cannot tell you
A register records permission, not conduct. It will not say whether pricing is competitive, whether execution is good, whether support answers, or whether withdrawals are paid on time. It also lags: an entry reflects status as at the last update, while enforcement action, conditions and restrictions are often published in a separate part of the same site. Checking the register answers one question well — is this entity permitted to do this, here — and no others.
Warning lists and cloned firms
Most authorities also publish a list of firms they have warned the public about, and many keep a specific category for clones: unauthorised operations that copy an authorised firm's name, registration number and address precisely so that a register search appears to confirm them. The defence is the contact details. A genuine entry carries the telephone number, website and address the authority itself holds, and those are the ones to use — not the ones supplied by whoever made contact.
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