OANDA Review 2026: Eight Licences, One Capital Record Worth Reading

OANDA is a genuinely licensed broker rated Neutral at 6.7 out of 10. We verified its entities at five registers: NFA 0325821 in the US, FCA 542574 in the UK, AFSL 412981 in Australia, a Capital Markets Services licence in Singapore and a BVI licence for the entity serving most of the world. It is held out of the Trusted band by a 2020 CFTC fine for breaching minimum net capital, a US capital cushion that is now the thinnest of its established peers, a 2025 Brazilian regulator alert on its BVI entity, and the absence of any compensation scheme outside the United Kingdom.

Quick facts

OANDA is a genuinely licensed broker in eight markets and it publishes its entity list better than
most firms twice its size. It is rated Neutral rather than Trusted for three specific reasons, and
the first one is the kind of thing that should change how you read a capital figure.

The owner changed in December, and five regulators had to approve it

On 1 December 2025, FTMO completed the acquisition of OANDA Global Corporation
from CVC Asia Fund IV, which had owned the business since 2018. OANDA announced it the following
day.

FTMO is a Prague proprietary trading firm. It is best known for selling evaluation challenges to
traders who want funded accounts, which is a different business from being a regulated broker holding
retail client money. A prop firm buying a broker licensed in eight jurisdictions is not a routine
transaction, and it is worth knowing before you read anything else about OANDA.

Two things should be said in the firm’s favour, because they are true and because the opposite is
usually assumed. The closing required approvals from five regulators and took roughly eight
months, with the final approval arriving in November 2025. Change of control at a licensed
firm is exactly the kind of thing supervisors are supposed to examine, and five of them did. FTMO
also states that OANDA will be run as a fully standalone business.

What we cannot tell you is what any regulator asked for before approving, because none of that is
public. The reason we raise it at all is the section after next.

The licence check

OANDA names its entities and its numbers on its own site, which is better practice than it sounds.
When we reviewed FOREX.com its regulation page named eight regulators and zero
companies, and the entity map had to be assembled from regional footers. OANDA publishes the list.
Here is that list against the registers, checked on 12 October 2026.

Every entity we checked was where OANDA said it would be, holding what OANDA said it held. That
is not a given. We have published reviews where the licence number on the website belonged to a
different company entirely.

One fairness note on Singapore. OANDA gives a company registration number there and no licence
number, which looks like an omission until you open the register: MAS does not publish
licence numbers in its Financial Institutions Directory. It publishes licence type and
status. There is no number to quote, so this is not a gap in OANDA’s disclosure.

The list also contains OANDA Labs Assessment Limited, a Malta company whose own disclaimer says no
regulatory authorisation is required or held. Given who now owns the group, an entity named
“Assessment” is worth watching, and we will say what it does when we can establish it rather than
guess.

The 2020 order, and why it still matters in 2026

On 21 August 2020 the CFTC fined OANDA Corporation $500,000. The findings:

• it failed to meet minimum net capital requirements from 26 April to 21 August
  2019, a stretch of almost four months
• it breached the equity withdrawal restriction by paying dividends on 15 October
  2018, 26 April 2019 and 28 May 2019
• it failed to meet certain reporting requirements
• it failed to diligently supervise matters related to its business as a registrant

The order recognises the firm’s cooperation, and the shortfall was corrected six years ago. A
single capital breach is not a verdict on a broker.

What makes it relevant today is the current filing. The CFTC publishes every registered dealer’s
financial position monthly, and in the report dated as at 31 July 2026, OANDA Corporation holds
$33,191,483 of adjusted net capital against a $26,783,414 requirement, while holding
$132,445,959 of customer money.

That is a cushion of roughly 1.24 times the requirement. For comparison, among the four US retail
forex dealers the equivalent figures are about 2.79 for GAIN Capital and 3.06 for tastyfx. Only
Trading.com Markets is thinner, and it is a far smaller business holding under $3m of client money
rather than $132m.

So: the firm with the thinnest cushion relative to its requirement among the established US
dealers is also the one that has previously been fined for falling below that requirement while
paying dividends out. Those are two separate official documents six years apart. Neither predicts
anything. Together they are a reason to look at the capital column rather than the homepage, and we
set out the whole American picture on our USA page.

Where your money sits depends on which page you signed up from

This is the part most OANDA reviews skip, and it changes the answer completely.

A British client gets the strongest protection OANDA offers anywhere. An American client gets the
weakest arrangement of any major market in the world, which is a feature of the US regime rather than
of OANDA. Everyone else gets a British Virgin Islands company.

Fund safety scores 6.5 on that spread. The UK entity alone would score well above it.

What it costs, and where the numbers disagree with each other

OANDA publishes real pricing, which puts it ahead of several brokers we rate higher. Two models on
most sites: spread-only, where the cost is in the spread, and core pricing, where a tighter spread
carries a separate commission.

On the Australian site, for OANDA Australia Pty Ltd, EUR/USD is quoted from 0.7
on spread-only and from 0.0 on raw spreads, with commission stated plainly at $3.50 per
100,000 traded. That is a complete, checkable cost picture.

On the BVI site, which serves most of the world, the same exercise falls apart.
The pricing table shows EUR/USD at 1 for spread-only and 0.1 for core, with no units given. A
separate section of the same page says EUR/USD trades “from 0.6 pips”. Those two statements do not
agree, and the commission that the core model depends on is not stated at all.

So the entity with the fewest protections also publishes the least reliable pricing. Cost scores
7.0 because the data genuinely exists and is good in the regulated markets, and transparency carries
the BVI inconsistency instead.

Brazil’s regulator has published a warning about the BVI entity

On 8 January 2025 Brazil’s Comissao de Valores Mobiliarios published an alert naming
OANDA Global Markets Ltd, categorised as an unregistered or unlicensed entity offering
financial products or services, and flagging the Portuguese-language page at oanda.com/bvi-pt/.

This needs reading carefully, because the category sounds worse than the finding.

OANDA Global Markets Ltd is licensed. We confirmed it on the BVI Financial
Services Commission’s own register of currently regulated entities, authorised for dealing as
principal. The CVM is not saying the company is fake. It is saying the company is not registered in
Brazil and may not solicit Brazilian residents, which is a jurisdictional point that catches a number
of legitimate international brokers.

It still counts, for one reason. The flagged page is in Portuguese. A firm can argue it did not
target a market right up until it publishes a page in that market’s language, and the complaints
pillar scores 4.5 on this alongside the CFTC order.

What is genuinely good

The entity disclosure, which is the thing this site cares about most and the thing most brokers do
worst. OANDA publishes a full list of group companies with registration numbers, regulators and
company numbers, in one place, without being asked. Working out who you would actually be trading
with took minutes rather than the several hours the same exercise took for FOREX.com.

The UK entity holds the client money permission that separates a real broker from a firm that
passes your money to someone else. The Australian pricing page is as clear as anything we have read
this year. And the platform set is strong: fxTrade, which is OANDA’s own and has been running for
two decades, plus MT4 and a TradingView integration.

OANDA has also been trading since 1996, which is long enough to have survived several events that
removed competitors.

Where this rating sits

Neutral runs from 6.0 to 7.4, so this sits in its upper half. OANDA is a real broker with real
licences and it is not in the same conversation as the firms we rate High Risk. What keeps it out of
Trusted is a capital record that has been formally criticised once and is thinner than its peers now,
a regulator alert on the entity most of its clients use, and the fact that most of those clients have
no compensation scheme at all.

What would move it up: a visibly stronger US capital position in a later CFTC
filing; the BVI pricing page corrected so its table and its prose agree and the commission is stated;
resolution or withdrawal of the CVM alert.

What would move it down: another capital or reporting finding in any jurisdiction;
evidence that the change of control has thinned capital at any licensed entity; or a second regulator
alert. Our scoring method is published on our methodology page.

What to check yourself

Three checks, none of which take long, and you should not take our word for any of them.

Search NFA BASIC for OANDA and read the Regulatory Actions column, then open the
record rather than stopping at the registration summary. Search the FCA register for 542574 and read
the client money line. And before you deposit anywhere, open the legal page of the exact site you are
signing up on and find out which company is named, because for OANDA the answer changes by country
and the protection changes with it.

Type each regulator’s address yourself rather than following a link a broker gives you.

Answered in detail

Rated higher on the same scale

Rated Trusted or Neutral against the same six pillars. These link to our own reviews, not to the brokers, and no broker can pay to appear here.

Verdict changelog