The retail arm of brokerage group Finalto has stopped onboarding clients from the UK.
Attempting to access Markets.com from the UK will result in you being turned away as a client, with the broker saying it does not accept retail clients from the country.
TradeInformer understands that the company is looking to sell its retail book to another provider.
The company will continue to serve institutional and professional clients in the UK.
Since the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) imposed leverage restrictions on UK clients in 2018, the country has become much tougher to do business in.
This problem has only been compounded by the onerous and bureaucratic ‘Consumer Duty’ regulatory regime that the FCA imposed on companies last year.
Those rules make it much more burdensome to onboard UK clients, with a huge number of warnings and other approvals needed before you can even take them on.
Moreover, firms are effectively forced to hold on to all client communications in case something goes wrong and they have to ‘prove’ they did nothing wrong by taking the client on.
This has become so extreme that when we spoke to OptionsDesk last year, they noted that the biggest investment they had to make was in tech that would track client comms so that they could prove they had done nothing wrong to the regulator if a client complained.
Consequently many companies are simply giving up on doing any retail business in the UK.