The Bank of Russia, the country’s central bank, announced on Thursday that it has issued a Forex dealer license to Brokercreditservice – Forex (BCS-Forex) that will allow the company to carry out regulated operations.
“On November 18, 2021, the Bank of Russia decided to issue a license of a professional participant in the securities market to carry out the activities of a forex dealer to Limited Liability Company BrokerCreditService - Forex (Moscow),” the central bank noted in a statement.
The locally regulated forex market in Russia is very small. With the addition of BCS-Forex, only four regulated forex dealers are now operating in the country. The other three forex dealers operating with a local Russian license are VTB Forex, Alfa-Forex, and FINAM Forex.
Despite the small number, the Russian central bank cancelled the forex dealer license of PSB-Forex, the FX subsidiary of Promsvyazbank, within almost four years of its launch operations plagued with weak financial performance, Finance Magnates reported earlier.
Growing Demand for FX
Meanwhile, the number of clients with these Russia-regulated forex dealers is constantly growing. In the second quarter of 2021, the then three operated platforms onboarded added a total of 5,489 new clients, while the total number of traders surpassed 34,900. Moreover, the total quarterly trading turnover came in at more than 2.119 trillion rubles.
However, most of the retail forex activities in the country are handled by foreign brokers that offer services in the country using their overseas licenses. But, the central bank blacklisted a long list of unregulated foreign companies earlier this year that names foreign forex brokers, cryptocurrency exchanges and binary options providers.
