Opening an IC Markets Account from the Philippines

What a Philippine resident needs before starting

Nothing on the list below is Philippines-specific, and that is the point: IC Markets runs one onboarding process for every open market and does not operate a Philippine variant of it. What is Philippines-specific is what the process does not offer - no peso base currency, no local funding rail, and no Filipino-language interface - so a Manila-based applicant is choosing from an international menu rather than a local one.

• Proof of identity and proof of address (standard KYC); the exact document list is not published in the material we checked
• A funding method in your own name - the broker does not accept third-party payments
• An account base currency from USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD or CAD; PHP is not offered

How long: Not published in the material we checked (checked 2 September 2026) - ask the broker in writing before relying on a timescale
Eligibility: A resident of the Philippines is, per the broker's own registration feed checked 2 September 2026, routed by default to Raw Trading Ltd (Seychelles, FSA Securities Dealer's licence SD018) - the branch marked open for the Philippines. There is no SEC Philippines secondary licence, and SEC Philippines separately publishes advisories about unregistered offshore forex/CFD platforms.

The order these decisions actually arrive in

The sequence below is deliberately not the sequence the registration form uses. The form asks for the base currency somewhere in the middle, as though it were a preference; for an applicant banking in pesos it is the first decision and the one with the longest tail, so it is listed first here.

1. Settle the base currency first. The account is held in one of ten currencies and the peso is not among them, so a Philippine bank balance is converted at the edge of the process rather than inside it - and the choice is awkward to change once the account is funded.
2. Start the registration from the button on this page, using an email address you will still control in a year: it doubles as the recovery address for the client portal.
3. Enter the residential address you can actually evidence. Verification is document-led, and an address that does not match the document is the ordinary reason a file stops moving.
4. Upload proof of identity and proof of address. IC Markets does not publish the exact document list, so plan for a second request rather than assuming one upload closes the matter.
5. Choose the account type and the platform together. A MetaTrader account and a cTrader account are priced differently and served from different data centres, and the choice fixes which server your orders reach.
6. Fund from an account or card in your own name. Third-party payments are refused outright, so a relative's card cannot be used even with their permission; a joint account is accepted only if you are one of the parties.
7. Read the withdrawal route before the first deposit, not after the first profit. Withdrawals return to the source of the deposit, and a card withdrawal is capped at whatever that card paid in.

Which company the signature is actually with

IC and IC Markets Global are trading names rather than companies. The company a Philippine resident contracts with is Raw Trading Ltd, registered in Seychelles under number 8419879-1 and holding Securities Dealer's licence SD018 from the Seychelles Financial Services Authority. On IC Markets' own registration feed, checked on 2 September 2026, the Philippines shows as open and routed by default to that entity, with introducing-broker activity enabled and a second branch listed only as FSC_ICT(12) also registered against the country.

The other entities carrying the brand are separate legal persons and are not the counterparty here: IC Markets (EU) Ltd is a Cyprus company under CySEC CIF 362/18, International Capital Markets Pty Ltd is the Australian company, and IC Trading (Mauritius) Ltd operates ictrading.com. A licence held by one of them is not a licence covering an account opened from Manila.

Stated plainly, and without accusation: the Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines has granted IC Markets no secondary licence, so there is no Philippine layer of oversight above the Seychelles one. SEC Philippines does publish advisories about unregistered offshore forex and CFD platforms operating in the country; whether any particular platform is named on the current list is a question to settle at SEC Philippines itself rather than on a page like this one. The Philippines is not on IC Markets' own restricted list, which names the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Iran and North Korea, along with any jurisdiction where distribution would be contrary to local law.

The base-currency decision, and what getting it wrong costs

There are ten base currencies to choose from - USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD and CAD - and PHP is not one. Nor does the peso appear on the funding side: the published card rail settles in AUD, USD, JPY, EUR, NZD, SGD, GBP and CAD, PayPal adds HKD and CHF, and the bank wire rail covers AUD, USD, JPY, EUR, NZD, SGD, GBP, CAD and CHF. Every one of those lists is missing the same currency.

So the capital crosses a currency boundary twice: pesos into the base currency at funding, and the base currency back into pesos at withdrawal. IC Markets states that it charges no deposit or withdrawal fee of its own - but it does not perform the conversion either. Your card issuer or bank does, at a rate the broker neither sets nor publishes, and third-party or intermediary charges sit outside its responsibility. Two crossings at r per cent each cost roughly 2r per cent of the capital, paid before the trading starts and again after it ends, and it is the one cost a demo account can never show.

Choosing USD as the base currency removes a third conversion inside the account, because almost everything the broker charges is already quoted in dollars - USD 3.50 per lot per side of commission on a Raw Spread MetaTrader account, USD 3.00 per USD 100,000 on cTrader Raw Spread, and the Swap Free holding fee published per symbol. It does nothing at all about the two crossings at the edges.

The exit is shaped at the entrance

Withdrawals are requested inside the Secure Client Area and must return to the source of the deposit. An e-wallet withdrawal goes back to the same e-wallet. A FasaPay-funded account is paid out by bank wire rather than back through FasaPay. A card withdrawal is capped at the amount that card deposited, and anything above the cap has to leave by another method already used or by bank wire.

For a Philippine resident that has one specific consequence, and it is the reason this belongs on the account-opening page rather than a withdrawal page: the deposit itself can come back to the card, but profit above the deposit leaves by international bank wire - stated at up to 14 days, and open to intermediary and beneficiary bank charges IC Markets does not control. Choosing the funding method is therefore also choosing the exit route.

Timing follows the same logic. Requests are cut off at 12:00 AEST or AEDT, which falls around 10:00 Manila time in Australian standard months and around 09:00 in daylight-saving months; requests filed before the cut-off are processed the same day, those after it on the next business day. Card withdrawals then take 3-5 business days and occasionally as long as 10. A processing fee may also apply where deposited funds were never used for trading.

What is not in the box for a Philippine account

• No Philippine funding route. The only country-specific rails IC Markets publishes are Thai Internet Banking and Vietnamese Internet Banking, limited to those two markets.
• No Filipino interface. The brand's own site is offered in sixteen languages and Filipino is not one of them, which is why an account opened from Manila is operated in English throughout.
• No local desk. The Help Centre, email and live chat are stated as available 24 hours a day, Monday to Sunday, from one global support operation; no Philippines office and no Filipino-language queue are advertised.
• No local deposit protection. Client money is stated to be held in segregated accounts with top-tier international banks, which is a broker statement about custody rather than a Philippine compensation scheme.

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