France’s financial markets regulator, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), has today warned the public against 16 websites that purport to offer binary options trading yet lack any verifiable authorization to do so, as per an official advisory.
Added to unauthorised list
The list of providers that were published includes the following domain names:
abroption.com, allianz-brokers.com, banque-investissement.com, barclaystraders.com, connecting-trade.com, collinsgestion.com, f-generalsecurities.com, finpari.com, gointrading.com, ibl-markets.com, microption.com, mytradeoption.com, solution-capital.com, stock-binary.com, switzerland-capital.com, and swisspartners-ag.com.
The AMF said that the full list of unauthorized sites such as those described above is available on the regulator's website, and emphasized that these domains may change very quickly and that the list is not meant to be exhaustive.
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Furthermore, traders seeking to invest in France with licensed brokers should view the register of financial agents on regafi.fr, and a list of authorized intermediaries in additional investor advisor categories on orias.fr/search.
Recent increased scrutiny
France's AMF has been quite active in policing binary options in its country and has made numerous such announcements and warnings as Finance Magnates has reported on over recent years.
The binary options industry has come under intense scrutiny by media and regulators in recent months as there are still a large number of firms that operate without any Regulation despite regulations existing in other regions where regulated binary options brokers operate without any incidence.
Because of this regulatory arbitrage or inconsistency across jurisdictions, the magnifying glass has been put on some firms as issues related to best-execution, not honoring customer withdrawal requests or related matters of not upholding proper business ethics have come under question.
There is, however, a working model of the binary options industry that can be mirrored elsewhere such as in the United States and Japan, as well as in other regulatory jurisdictions which have proper checks and balances to help ensure that these products are facilitated in a safer manner for clients.
