Opening an IC Markets Account From South Africa: Which Company You Actually Sign With

What you need to open an account

The document list is ordinary KYC. Two of the four requirements below are where South Africa quietly parts company with the broker's global instructions, and both are easier to settle before the form than after it.

• Proof of identity and proof of address. The precise document list is not published in the material we checked on 2 September 2026, so treat any list you find elsewhere as unverified until the broker asks you for it directly.
• A funding instrument in your own name. Third-party payments are refused in both directions, and a joint account qualifies only when you are one of the parties.
• An account base currency from USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD or CAD; ZAR is not offered

How long: Not published in the material we checked (2 September 2026) - ask the broker in writing before relying on a timescale
Eligibility: A resident of South Africa is onboarded, by default, to Raw Trading Ltd (Seychelles, FSA Securities Dealer licence SD018) - branch 3 on the broker's own registration feed, the same default used worldwide, checked 2 September 2026. Separately, International Capital Markets (Pty) Ltd is a distinct South African company holding FSCA licence FSP 50715, status Authorised - a public record on the FSCA's own register. Confirm in writing which of these two entities is named on your own client agreement before funding an account; the two are not interchangeable, and only one of them answers to the FSCA.

The registration path, and the two points where it forks

Seven steps, of which two matter more than the rest. Step three decides which branch — and therefore which company — the application is routed to, and step five fixes a base currency that cannot be the rand. Everything else is form filling.

1. Begin from the account-opening button on this page, and if you arrived from anywhere else, reach the client area by typing the address yourself.
2. Give an email address you control and set a portal password. This credential opens the client area only — it will never open a trading terminal.
3. Enter your South African residential details. The country you give is what routes the application to a branch, and the branch decides which company you end up contracting with.
4. Upload identity and address documents. The exact list is not published, so expect an ordinary identity document or passport plus a recent proof of address, and ask in writing if anything is refused.
5. Choose the account type and the base currency. This is the fork that is awkward to undo: the rand is not offered, so pick from the ten published currencies with your own bank's conversion cost in mind.
6. Fund the account. The published minimum is USD 0 on Raw Spread, cTrader Raw Spread and Standard, and no South African rail exists, so the deposit arrives by card, wallet or wire after converting rand into the base currency.
7. Download the terminal from inside the client area, and note the server name it hands you — it is the visible trace of which company holds the account.

The two fields in this form that are hard to change later

Most of the registration form is ordinary and reversible. Two fields are not, and both look ordinary enough to be filled in without thinking.

The first is country of residence. It is not a mailing preference: on the broker’s own registration feed it selects the branch the application is routed to, and the branch determines the company that ends up on your client agreement. South Africa is open, and it defaults to the same branch used across most of the world — a Seychelles company, not the separately FSCA-licensed South African one whose FSP 50715 is a public record on the FSCA’s own register. Whether that is what you expected is worked through on the main page of this site; at this step the point is narrower, that the country field is what decides it.

The second is base currency. Ten are offered and the rand is not among them, so the choice fixes which foreign currency your equity, your margin and your profit and loss will be denominated in for the life of the account. Changing it later normally means opening a new account rather than flipping a setting, and every rand you send converts into it on the way in and back out of it on the way out. Choose with your own bank’s conversion cost in mind rather than by habit — the arithmetic is worked through on the margin and pip calculator page.

What happens between submitting the form and placing a trade

There are three gates after the form, not one. Verification asks for identity and address documents, and the exact list is not published in the material we checked, so treat any list quoted elsewhere as unverified until the broker asks you for it. Funding must come from an instrument in your own name: third-party payments are refused in both directions, and a joint account qualifies only when you are one of the parties. The platform is then downloaded from inside the client area, which is also where the trading account number and its server string appear — separate credentials from the ones you have just created, a distinction that catches people out often enough to have its own login page here.

No time to first trade is published anywhere we could check, so this page promises none. A free demo account runs the entire platform side in parallel while verification is in progress, which is the cheapest possible way to spend the wait, and it needs no allowance, no conversion and no decision about which company holds your money.

CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money. This is an independent site: it takes no deposits, opens no accounts and holds no client money.

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