Most international brokers are a group. The website you see may be operated by a different company from the one that would hold your money. A UK entity authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, an Australian entity with an AFSL, and an offshore entity with a securities-dealer licence can share a logo and still offer different leverage, different compensation schemes and different complaint routes.
The useful record is the legal name, the regulator, the licence or firm-reference number, and the register entry. Market Explain stores those separately and links the page they were read from. If a firm says it is regulated in a country but does not print the number, the number stays pending. A missing number is not filled in from memory.
Authorisation is not a promise that withdrawals will be fast or that spreads will match the advertisement. It does mean there is a rulebook, a register, and usually a path to an ombudsman or a compensation scheme, with eligibility limits. An offshore licence can be real and still offer a narrower path if something goes wrong. That is a description of the regime, not a score.
Clone firms copy a genuine name and a genuine number. The check is whether the domain, the company number and the address match the register, not whether the email sounds plausible. Market Explain’s directory is a research notebook of what we could confirm. It is not a recommendation to open an account.