The LSE Directory / CFD and forex brokers
FBS is an online forex and CFD broker founded in 2009, offering retail trading in currency pairs, metals, energies, indices, stocks and cryptocurrency CFDs, with more than 550 tradable instruments. Clients trade through MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5 and a proprietary FBS mobile app, choosing between standard and micro/cent account types with demo versions available. The company states it serves clients in more than 150 countries and reports having reached 27 million clients by 2022. FBS targets beginner and intermediate retail traders rather than institutional flow, competing chiefly on low entry barriers: very small minimum deposits, cent accounts, and leverage advertised up to 1:3000 for clients onboarded through its Belize entity, well above what EU or Australian rules allow. Regulatory protection varies sharply by entity. EU clients are onboarded under Tradestone Limited, a Cyprus Investment Firm licensed by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (license 331/17), and Australian clients under an ASIC-regulated entity; both carry Tier-1 oversight and standard leverage caps. Most non-EU, non-Australian clients instead trade under FBS Markets Inc, licensed offshore by Belize's Financial Services Commission, a jurisdiction that does not run a statutory investor-compensation scheme equivalent to the UK's FSCS or the EU's ICF. The company was founded in 2009; Wikipedia and Crunchbase both name Satthakarn Chuenkomol as founder and CEO, though this could not be independently corroborated beyond those two sources. FBS opened its Cyprus (EU) subsidiary in 2017 after its early years focused on Asian markets, and has run sponsorship and marketing partnerships including a campaign tie-in with Leicester City Football Club and sponsorship of the Finance Magnates Summit in 2024, the year the company marked its 15th anniversary with an app relaunch and a rebranding. In October 2020, security researchers at WizCase found FBS had left an unsecured Elasticsearch server exposing roughly 20TB of data, including client passports, national ID scans, bank statements and unredacted card details; FBS secured the server within days of being notified, per contemporaneous reporting from ITPro, Infosecurity Magazine and SecurityAffairs. FBS's affiliate/IB program, advertised with commissions up to 43 percent, is a significant part of its client-acquisition model alongside cash-back and volume-based promotions, a growth approach trade press has described as aggressive relative to Tier-1-regulated competitors that rely less on bonus-driven acquisition.
