Belarus

Belarus is one of the few countries to have created a purpose-built legal regime for retail forex, and to have placed it under the National Bank rather than a securities regulator.

The regime

A presidential decree established a framework under which forex companies must be registered with the National Bank, meet capital requirements, join a supervisory arrangement, and operate under rules covering client funds, leverage limits and reporting. The country also promoted the sector actively, including with tax incentives on individuals' trading income intended to bring activity into the regulated perimeter rather than leave it offshore. Those incentives have been time-limited and revised, so the current treatment needs checking directly rather than assuming what an older article describes.

The design is coherent and unusual: instead of banning the activity or ignoring it, Belarus licensed it, taxed it lightly and brought it onshore. Whether that produced better outcomes for traders than Europe's restrictions is a genuinely open question, and one worth being honest about — the loss rates that drove the ESMA caps are a function of leverage and retail behaviour, not of where a licence was issued.

The context that overrides it

Belarus has been subject to extensive international sanctions since 2020 and more severely since 2022. Major banks have been disconnected from SWIFT, international card schemes have withdrawn, and cross-border payment corridors to and from Western financial institutions have largely closed. The domestic regime may function while access to foreign brokers and payment providers does not. A trader in Belarus faces a payments problem before a regulatory one.

What to establish

• Whether the firm is actually registered with the National Bank, from the National Bank's own list rather than the firm's site.
• Which legal entity holds the account — a locally registered company or an offshore affiliate of the same brand.
• Whether the withdrawal route works today, tested with a small amount before any significant deposit.

Checks

The National Bank publishes the register of forex companies and information about the regime's current terms.