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The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) said on Wednesday it has provided a forex broker license to Forex Club, one of the leading market participants. The regulator provided no details. The CBR earlier this year denied a license to the broker without explaining why and whether it failed to meet any criteria.
Forex Club initially applied for a forex broker license in Russia in December 2015. Although the CBR has to take its decision and announce it within 60 business days, it took it six months to come up with a statement. In early June, the CBR said it has denied the broker’s license application. At the time, the broker said it would reapply.
Forex Club is the fifth broker to receive a CBR license for the forex markets. The rest of the licensees are Finam Forex, TeleTrade, TrustForex and VTB24 Forex. The market leader, Alpari, was also denied license earlier in 2016.
In a separate notice, Forex Club’s general director, Pavel Karyagin, said that for the company obtaining a license from the Russian regulator is an important step for the group’s development. He noted that the move indicates the bank’s confidence that the broker is reliable and meets all qualifications and requirements.
As of 1 January, 2016, Russia started requiring locally-based forex brokers to be licensed by the CBR in order to operate in the country. However, foreign brokers are still allowed to target local citizens without any significant restrictions and most market participant continue to operate in the country through their foreign units. Last week, the central bank announced it intends to determin its position regarding binary options trading in the country by the end of 2017.
Forex Club is a collective brand of several entities that provide trading in forex and CFDs on shares, metals, indices, and other instruments. The brokerage has clients in more than 120 countries, mainly within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), or the former Soviet countries. Through its subsidiary Financial Company Forex Club, the group recently became one of the first entities to obtain a status as a registered forex broker in Belarus (the equivalent of obtaining an authorization).
Forex Club was the second largest forex broker in Russia (after Alpari) with an average monthly trading volume of $54 billion and 80,000 active client accounts, according to a report by Interfax-Center for Economic Analysis (Interfax-CEA).
