What a licence actually buys the customer

A declared and published standard of customer-fund protection — which at the lowest permitted tier means no segregation at all — a compulsory complaints route ending in an approved dispute resolver, advertising rules, age verification, and a regulator that can suspend or revoke. Not a guarantee that you will be paid, and not a guarantee that the company will still exist next year.

The protections are procedural rather than financial. A licence obliges a company to hold your money in a stated way and to have a route for disputes; it does not insure the balance, and the level of protection is itself a disclosure the operator makes rather than a single national standard.

The dispute route matters more than most of the list. An unlicensed operator's final answer is its own; a licensed one's is not.

What follows from that is less comfortable. 'Licensed' gets treated as 'my money is safe'. The protections are real and they are narrower than that, and the difference shows up exactly when a company fails.

What to do with it. Find the customer-funds disclosure and the named dispute resolver before depositing. Both are required to be published, and both tell you what happens on the day something goes wrong.