Is Tickmill legit? The FCA licence is real, but not yours

Tickmill’s record is clean: a real FCA licence (FRN 717270), and no regulator has issued a warning about it. What you need to know is that Vietnamese clients do not sit under that licence. They sit under the Seychelles entity, where the level of protection and the compensation fund are far weaker.

Same Tickmill logo, four different contracts

Tickmill publicly lists four entities on its own licensing page. The list itself is not the part to read closely. The gap in compensation funds from one row to the next is:

A client in the UK who loses money because the broker goes bust is compensated by the FSCS up to 85,000 pounds. A client in the EU gets up to 20,000 euros from the ICF. A Vietnamese client in the same situation has no mechanism at all. Same brand, same MT4/MT5, same logo.

And Tickmill is not an isolated case. Of the 20 brokers on our watch list, as many as 15 run this two-layer setup side by side: a Tier-1 entity for display, and an offshore entity that signs clients outside the EU/UK. The details are in our article on whether a Tier-1 licence protects Vietnamese clients.

Why do you end up with the Seychelles entity?

Nobody is deliberately pushing you towards weaker protection. The reason is legal: the FCA and CySEC only license firms to serve clients within their own jurisdictions. A broker that wants clients outside the EU/UK has to have an entity somewhere that allows it, usually Seychelles, Vanuatu, Belize or Mauritius.

DCTopTrade has recorded exactly this structure at VT Markets, JustMarkets, Mitrade and CPT Markets. The problem is not that a broker has an offshore entity (one registered in an island jurisdiction, where supervision is much lighter).

The problem is that the homepage shows the FCA badge while the contract you sign carries the name of a different company, and not everyone reads as far as that line.

The CySEC register confirms one more thing

The register of Cyprus Investment Firms (CySEC’s public register), updated 04/08/2026, reads:

“Tickmill Europe Ltd. Licence Number: 278/15. Licence Date: 05/08/2015. Company Registration Number: 340249.”

Head office in Limassol, status active. The figures in the table above are correct. But the register also records two details that are worth more:

The approved domain is www.tickmill.com/eu, not tickmill.com. Vietnamese clients use the root domain, which means they are outside the scope of this Cyprus licence.

This entity used to be called Vipro Markets Ltd. A name change is not a bad sign, but if you search the register and see an old name that differs from the one being advertised, it helps to know this so you do not think you looked up the wrong company.

Read your account confirmation email: the fastest way to know which layer you are in

You need no special tools. These three traces fully answer the question “who am I signing with?”:

The company that sends the account-opening confirmation email is your entity. If you see plain “Tickmill Ltd”, with no “UK” and no “Europe”, that means Seychelles. If you see “Tickmill Europe Ltd”, you belong to the Cyprus entity and the ICF protects you up to €20,000.

The footer of the website version you are using: each entity has its own domain or region, and the footer states the matching licence number.

A reverse check of the licence number: enter 717270 into the FCA Register and it returns Tickmill UK Ltd. If your account does not belong to that company, that search result has nothing to do with you.

Tickmill’s credit column and debit column

On the credit side, everything can be verified. Two strict-tier licences, FCA 717270 and CySEC 278/15, both show up on public registers, while many brokers boast about the FCA without being able to produce a number. Trading conditions are published openly:

Classic from 1.6 pips with no commission, Raw from 0.0 pips plus 3 USD per lot per side, a minimum deposit of 100 USD for every account type, a minimum withdrawal of 25 USD, and no deposit or withdrawal fees charged by the broker.

Tickmill also has no history of being named by Vietnamese authorities, unlike the group in our section on brokers that have collapsed.

On the debit side, three items:

No deposit or withdrawal channel in Vietnamese dong (VND). The official deposit and withdrawal page does not list Vietnamese bank transfers or Vietnamese e-wallets.

You have to use international bank transfer, cards, international e-wallets or cryptocurrency, and any of these channels can incur conversion or intermediary fees. That is a clear difference from some brokers that have VND deposit and withdrawal channels.

Leverage up to 1:1000. EU clients under CySEC are capped at 1:30 under ESMA rules. The 1:1000 figure can only exist because you are in an entity that is not subject to that cap. That alone tells you something about the level of supervision.

Tickmill does not serve Singapore, the US, Iran, India or Japan. Vietnam is not on the restricted list, but no international forex broker is licensed in Vietnam either. You trade as an individual and carry the responsibility yourself.

My answer to “should I use it?”

A better question than “is Tickmill good or bad?” is “which licence am I standing under, and where do I complain if something goes wrong?”

For Vietnamese clients, the answer is FSA Seychelles, with no compensation fund, meaning no fund that pays clients when a licensed firm becomes insolvent. Once you know that, whether to use it becomes an informed decision rather than one based on the FCA badge in the footer.

If you still use it, start with an amount you can afford to lose, and withdraw profits regularly instead of letting them pile up in the account.

Tickmill next to XM: two clean records, a single difference

To put it plainly: Tickmill has no problem with its record. A real FCA licence (FRN 717270), no warning from any regulator, and it is not among the brokers people have filed complaints about.

Both put Vietnamese clients into an offshore entity (Tickmill: Seychelles, XM: Belize), so this is not a choice about safety, and it would be dishonest of me to tell you to leave Tickmill for that reason.

The real difference is the barrier to entry: XM lets you open an account from 5 USD and has a Micro account, which suits you better if you want to test with very small capital first. Read the XM review and licence details to compare further.

Forex/CFD trading is high risk; you may lose part or all of your capital.

If you are weighing a wider choice, these are three brokers with verifiable licences for which we keep full profiles:

XM (4.65★, FSC / ASIC / CySEC, minimum deposit 5 USD), Exness (4.9★, globally regulated with multiple licences, low first deposit depending on the payment method), IC Markets (4.7★, ASIC / CySEC / SCB, no minimum deposit).

Every review cites the licence numbers so you can check them yourself. Whichever broker you choose, open the register and look up the exact entity named in your account contract, not the brand name. Assess the risk for yourself and start with a demo account.

Spotted something inaccurate? Tell us and we will check it and publish a correction.