FCA in England and CySEC in Cyprus are popular financial regulations for brokerage companies.

These are also two trustworthy regulations for traders when choosing their partners(brokers).

Recently, these regulatory authorities have been upgrading its conditions to improve the service environment and to protect clients of these brokerage companies.

But there are of course some differences between FCA and CySEC license and we like to make it clear this time.

Most strict regulation FCA

Both FCA and CySEC are located in Europe though, there are some big differences in regards to “Financial Operations” and “Service Management”.

Segregated account in trust

All FCA regulated brokers must have segregated and trusted accounts for clients’ funds.

On the other hand, CySEC regulated brokers are not obligated to have 100% segregated accounts. Meaning that your funds under CySEC may not be segregated, and that depends on the broker itself.

Deposit/Withdrawals

FCA has strictly set rules to financial operations.

Especially regarding to withdrawals, FCA regulated brokers must automate the process and process it immediately as the clients request.

This is to protect the funds of clients and one of the biggest merit of trading with brokers under FCA.

But CySEC brokers are allowed to delay withdrawals and they could even take a few months to withdraw funds.

Acquiring the license

Acquiring the FCA license does not come cheap.

FCA requires registration fee and the internal procedure, especially compliance service to be more strict than other regulations.

This caused most of the brokers to earn the CySEC license first even small brokerage companies, but only a few of them earned the FCA license later.

FCA license is simply the license to prove the quality of a brokerage company.

Bonus & Promotions

The difference of the financial operations between CySEC and FCA brokers can also be found when it comes to bonus promotions.

Bonus itself is different

CySEC regulation is most popular one among brokerage companies and it is not too restrict like ASIC in Australia but not too free like some offshore licenses.

And CySEC allows brokers to have some gorgeous bonus promotions like no deposit bonuses and cash back bonus etc.

As CySEC brokers offer these gorgeous promotions, many traders are attracted to CySEC brokers and CySEC license itself is also known by among traders now.

On the other hand, FCA requires more restrict promotions which do not cause problems later on.

So you may not find much promotions run by FCA brokers though, FCA license is attractive to traders who manages larger funds and find the trading environment and the bonuses are balanced and profitable.

Withdrawal process speed

As mentioned before, CySEC allows brokers to process withdrawals manually and take days to complete, but FCA doesn’t.

FCA broker process withdrawals instantly and automatically, and does not allow any actions to delay a withdrawal.

FCA restricting the gorgeous promotions is also intended to avoid the situations of withdrawal troubles. 

*If any brokers under FCA and CySEC have worked on a fraud, the license will be revoked by the regulators.

How to open accounts under FCA

Even though a broker is regulated by number of regulations including FCA and CySEC, that does not mean that your account is under these regulations.

For example, IronFX offers accounts under CySEC and FCA, and these are two different accounts.

• IronFX Global, CySEC in Cyprus
• IronFX UK, FCA in England

We, Hercules recommend traders to open accounts with IronFX UK under FCA if you are planning to trade with IronFX.

Please refer to the below to know how to find out the difference between them.

FCA account is “.co.uk”

To open an account with IronFX UK under FCA, you need to go to the website which URL is “ironfx.co.uk”.

The below link directly goes to the website of IronFX UK, FCA.

IronFX (ironfx.co.uk)

Client portal

If you have already opened an account with IronFX, you can find out by logging into the clientportal.

At the top of the screen, you can see if the account is under FCA or CySEC as above.

In this case, also the URLs are different as “.co.uk” and “.com”.

*You can open the FCA account with IronFX though, most of the brokers restrict country residents for the licenses. If your broker is regulated by several regulations, please contact the support desk and find out which regulation you are under.