Cyprus's financial regulator, and the licence most EU-facing forex/CFD brokers on this site hold -- it carries full EU/MiFID passporting rights and a real investor-compensation fund.
CySEC (the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission) licenses and supervises Cyprus Investment Firms (CIFs), which is why so many forex and CFD brokers serving EU clients are licensed there: a single CySEC licence lets a firm passport its services across the entire EU/EEA under MiFID II, without needing a separate licence in every member state.
A CIF must meet minimum capital requirements, segregate client funds from the firm's own operating funds, follow EU-wide leverage caps for retail clients under ESMA's product intervention rules (typically 30:1 on major currency pairs, down to 2:1 on crypto CFDs), and submit to CySEC's ongoing supervision and periodic inspections.
If a CySEC-licensed firm fails and can't return client assets, the Investor Compensation Fund covers eligible retail clients up to €20,000 per person. This is a real statutory scheme, not marketing language -- but it has a cap, it applies per person (not per account), and it only applies to the specific CySEC-licensed entity, not to an unrelated offshore sister brand that happens to share a brand name.
A CySEC licence is a real, meaningful form of oversight, but it isn't a guarantee a broker is a good one to trade with, and it isn't a guarantee of profitability or even of good execution quality. CySEC has fined numerous licensed firms for misconduct -- see our Broker News for specific, dated examples -- and a licence can be voluntarily surrendered or formally withdrawn, after which the firm is no longer EU-regulated even if its marketing hasn't caught up. Always check the register directly rather than trusting a broker's own claim.
Search the firm's exact legal entity name (not just its brand name) on the official CySEC register of Cypriot Investment Firms, and confirm the licence number matches what the broker discloses. Every CySEC-regulated broker reviewed on this site has a direct link to this register on its own review page.
See our full, ranked list of CySEC-regulated brokers, sorted by our disclosed overall score.
See all regulation pages, or every broker holding this type of licence under Best Brokers.