Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA)

A federal public authority established by law to regulate and supervise securities and commodities markets in the United Arab Emirates. Its remit covers the licensing of firms that deal, broke, advise, manage or operate a market, the rules those firms follow in dealing with clients, the disclosure and marketing they may make, and the reporting and inspection through which compliance is verified. It publishes a register of the firms it has licensed and the activities each licence permits.

It is the onshore regulator, and that word is doing work. The country also contains financial free zones with their own legislative frameworks and their own regulators, the Dubai Financial Services Authority in the Dubai International Financial Centre and the Financial Services Regulatory Authority in the Abu Dhabi Global Market. Each maintains a separate rulebook and a separate register, so a firm regulated in one of them is not regulated by the authority described here, and the protections available follow the framework of the entity a client actually contracted with.

Two things are read into the word regulated that are not in it. Authorisation is a statement about a named legal entity and the specific activities on its licence, not about a group, a brand or a website, which is why the entity named on the terms and its number on the public register are the things that can be verified. And regulation is conduct supervision rather than a guarantee: it sets the rules for holding client money, for disclosure and for handling complaints, and none of that removes market risk or promises that a firm will not fail.