Opening an IC Markets Account From Pakistan: Entity, Currency, Payment Leg
Registration itself is quick and free. The three decisions worth making slowly are which entity you are contracting with, which base currency the balance sits in, and how money is ever going to reach it.
Open IC Markets Account →What you need to open an account
Nothing on this list is unusual for an offshore broker. Two items on it decide more than the rest: the name on the payment instrument, and the base currency you pick at registration.
- Proof of identity and proof of address in the standard way; the exact document list is not published anywhere we could check, so ask before you scan anything
- A payment instrument in your own name, because third-party payments are refused outright - a card or account belonging to a relative will be rejected however convenient it looks, though a joint account you are party to is accepted
- A base currency chosen from USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD and CAD - ten in total, none of them the rupee, and the choice is worth thinking about because it decides how many conversions a payment has to survive
How long: Not published anywhere we could check on 2 September 2026, so ask in writing rather than trusting a timescale quoted by a third party
Eligibility: Pakistan is open on the brand registration feed, and the branch it opens is Raw Trading Ltd of Seychelles under FSA Securities Dealer licence SD018, marked eligible for the Swap Free option. No Pakistani regulator licenses that relationship, because Pakistan operates no retail forex or CFD regime at all - and SBP EPD Circular Letter No. 08 of 2022 treats funding an offshore CFD platform as a breach of section 4(1) of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, directing banks to identify and block such payments.
The registration path in order
Seven steps, of which only the sixth involves money. Everything before it can be finished, checked and abandoned at no cost.
- Read the entity you are contracting with before anything else: Raw Trading Ltd of Seychelles, FSA Securities Dealer licence SD018, which is the branch the brand registration feed opens for Pakistan.
- Register the email address, and remember that this password opens the portal only - every trading account made later carries a separate one.
- Complete the form with Pakistani residential details; the country you declare decides which branch and which set of account options you are shown.
- Pass verification with a government ID and a proof of address, and make sure the name on both matches the name on whatever will later pay in.
- Pick the account type and the base currency together: Raw Spread bills USD 3.50 a side, Standard folds the cost into a spread from 0.8 pips, and both offer the Swap Free option that the Pakistani branch is marked eligible for.
- Fund it, knowing that nothing on the fifteen-rail published funding list is Pakistani and none of the rails carries PKR: the minimum is USD 0 on Raw Spread, cTrader Raw Spread and Standard, USD 5,000 on Raw Pro and USD 100,000 on Raw Pro+.
- Install the platform the account was opened on - the choice is fixed at registration and cannot be swapped later - or spend a week on the demo first.
The payment step, stated plainly
The published funding list runs to fifteen rails: cards, PayPal, Neteller, Skrill, UnionPay, wire transfer, Bpay, FasaPay, broker-to-broker, POLI, Rapidpay, Klarna, and internet-banking routes built for Thailand and Vietnam. Not one of them is Pakistani, and not one of them settles in rupees. That is a fact worth stating rather than a gap worth filling: any page offering you a local Pakistani payment method for this broker is describing something that does not exist.
So a rupee budget crosses at least one exchange rate, and often two - once into whatever the payment instrument settles in, and again if that is not the base currency you chose at registration. Neither rate is published by the broker, which charges no deposit fee of its own but takes no responsibility for third-party costs either.
Above all of it sits SBP EPD Circular Letter No. 08 of 2022, which states that trading on offshore CFD platforms breaches section 4(1) of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, that no payment channel is permitted for it, and that banks are to identify and block such payments. That is the position of the State Bank of Pakistan, stated as a fact rather than as advice.
The cheap half of this, done first
Nothing above costs money except the last step, so it is worth running the whole platform question on a free demo account to get comfortable with the platform and test your strategy with virtual funds first.