Exness Review Kenya 2026

Exness (KE) Limited holds CMA Licence Number 162. We confirmed the entry on the CMA licensee register, where it appears as one of 14 non-dealing online foreign exchange brokers, and the exness.ke website footer describes the company as a non-dealing online foreign exchange broker under licence 162, with Kenyan company registration number PVT-LRUDJJB. The same footer states that the company does not offer services to residents of certain jurisdictions, including the USA, Canada, Iran, North Korea, Europe and the United Kingdom. We found no CMA cautionary statement or public notice against Exness (KE) Limited; the public notices we found warn about unlicensed online forex dealers. The register entry, the CMA's full list of non-dealing online forex brokers and its public caution of 11 September 2026, on which Exness does not appear, are shown below.

The Exness group also operates other companies, listed alongside Exness (KE) Ltd in the group's own entity list: Exness (SC) in Seychelles (FSA), Exness B.V. in Curaçao (CBCS), Exness (VG) in the British Virgin Islands (FSC) and Exness ZA in South Africa (FSCA). Our account did not sit with any of them: the Client Agreement, the account statement and the M-Pesa receipts all name Exness (KE) Limited.

The company that onboards Kenyan clients is the licensed entity itself. The Client Agreement (version 28 September 2026) is between the client and Exness (KE) Limited, is governed by the Laws of Kenya (clause 16.2), and sends disputes to the courts of Kenya (clause 16.1). Client money is held in a separate client money account, pooled with other clients' money and segregated from the company's own funds, with a bank licensed under the Banking Act of Kenya and held within Kenya (Part B, 1.3 to 1.6). The company provides negative balance protection (Key Facts Statement; Client Agreement, Part A, clause 2), as the CMA has required of licensed brokers since September 2023: losses are capped at the account balance, but that balance can still be lost in full. Exness (KE) Limited is also a member of the Financial Commission, which lists its certificate under the company's former name, Tadenex Limited, and the Client Agreement lets you take an unresolved complaint there within 45 days of the incident (clause 16.6); the Complaints Handling Policy also points to the CMA (4.12). The Commission is a private dispute-resolution body, not a regulator or a statutory scheme: it is free to use, its rulings bind Exness but bind you only if you accept them, and its compensation fund pays up to EUR 20,000 per client only when a member fails to pay a ruling. It does not compensate trading losses, and it is not cover for the firm failing.

Exness publishes extracts from the audited financial statements of Exness (KE) Limited (formerly Tadenex Limited, the name under which the CMA first issued Licence 162) for the year to 31 December 2023, approved on 25 March 2024, alongside unaudited statements for the first half of 2023; we found nothing later on its legal documents page. The 2023 extracts show capital comfortably above the CMA minimums: paid-up capital of KSh 142.7 million, shareholders' funds of KSh 135.0 million and liquid capital of KSh 64.7 million, against the KSh 30 million minimum the extracts give for each, and KSh 44.6 million of clients' cash held against KSh 24.4 million owed to clients. The CMA's Investor Compensation Fund does not help here. Section 18 of the Capital Markets Act sets it up to compensate investors for the failure of a licensed stockbroker or dealer, the Act treats online forex brokers as a separate category, and the levies that fund it fall on stockbrokers, dealers and broker dealers trading securities, not on forex brokers (Licensing Regulations, 2025, reg. 54(2)).

See our guide to the Capital Markets Authority.

Safety signals

Opening was fully online. We chose Kenya as the country of residence (Google sign-up is also offered), set an email and password, and confirmed the email within about half an hour. During sign-up Exness ran an eleven-question appropriateness assessment covering the purpose of the account, employment status, sources of income and wealth, estimated liquid wealth, annual net income, the share of income to be invested, past CFD trading experience, financial education or work experience, and two knowledge questions on margin and forced closure. We answered as a trader with limited experience and modest wealth. Exness's result said CFDs may be appropriate for us, then asked us to tick three risk confirmations before we could go on: that we can absorb significant losses, have read the risk disclosures and understand we may lose all the funds in the account. We also declared that we are not a US citizen or resident for tax purposes.

Identity and residential address were verified through Sumsub, which accepts bank documents, utility bills, government-issued documents or mobile operator documents from the last twelve months. Our identity document was approved, but our first proof of address, a utility bill and bank statements, was rejected because it "could not be verified". Exness's chat bot said the document must show your full name and address and have been issued within the last six months, stricter than the twelve months on the Sumsub screen. A live chat agent then told us at 13:47 that a KRA PIN certificate is "the easiest to use", or an acknowledgement receipt from KRA for this year's tax return, and listed the alternatives: a utility bill, bank statement, certificate of residence, a P.O. Box or private bag from a reliable source, a residence permit, vehicle registration or a tax bill. The account reached "Fully verified, 3 of 3 steps" with an unlimited deposit limit, and Exness emailed confirmation that the proof of residence was verified at 13:51 on 22 October. At the account-creation step the base currency is chosen from a dropdown, and we selected US dollars. Exness's Help Centre says the currency cannot be changed once chosen (you open a new account for a different one). It lists KES among the currencies for Standard, Pro, Raw Spread and Zero accounts, while Standard Cent uses cent currencies only. We did not open the dropdown fully on our account, so we have not seen KES offered there ourselves. Two real Standard accounts were created, an Exness Terminal account that held our funds and trades and an MT5 account left at zero, plus a demo account with a USD 10,000 practice balance.

All five account types offer leverage up to 1:400. We traded on a Standard account and did not open the Pro, Raw Spread or Zero accounts.

1. 1
   Register

   Choose Kenya as the country of residence, then an email address and a password, or a Google account.

2. 2
   Answer the appropriateness assessment

   Eleven questions on your finances, experience and knowledge, then a set of risk confirmations.

3. 3
   Verify your identity and address

   Through Sumsub, with a bank, utility, government or mobile operator document from the last twelve months. When our first proof of address was rejected, the live chat agent suggested a KRA PIN certificate as the easiest to use.

4. 4
   Start funding

   Fully verified, 3 of 3 steps, with an unlimited deposit limit.

Exness funds Kenyan accounts by M-Pesa, Airtel Money and Skrill, and we tested the M-Pesa round trip on 22 October 2026.

M-Pesa deposits run from KSh 1,500 to 250,000. We paid the minimum, KSh 1,500, and received USD 11.54 in a US dollar funding wallet at 130.045 KES per USD, with no deposit fee and a Safaricom transaction cost of KSh 0.00. The M-Pesa confirmation named the payee as EXNESS KE LIMITED and arrived at 2:17 PM, effectively instant.

The withdrawal was also by M-Pesa. We requested USD 11.00 at 4:29 PM, which required a Google Authenticator code, and the broker quoted KSh 1,404 to be received at 127.62 KES per USD with a 0 percent fee. The M-Pesa message confirmed KSh 1,404.00 received from EXNESS KE LIMITED in the same minute. Both ends were measured and both were free, and the withdrawal arrived far sooner than the one-hour average Exness quotes.

Because our account was in US dollars, both legs were converted, and the gap between the buying and selling rates cost about 1.9 percent over the round trip, even though Exness applies no separate conversion fee. Exness lists a Kenya shilling account currency, which we have not tested; see Kenya-specific features.

Funding methods

A Kenyan client can trade, all as CFDs: forex pairs (for example EUR/USD and USD/JPY), metals (gold and silver), energies (Brent crude, US crude oil and natural gas), indices (for example Australia 200, Germany 30, Japan 225, UK 100 and the US Tech 100) and US-listed share CFDs (for example Apple, AbbVie, AMD and Amgen, and we saw NetEase and Li Auto among the top movers). We traded EUR/USD only. Every instrument is a CFD, so there is no ownership of the underlying.

Crypto CFDs do not appear to be offered to Kenyan clients. The exness.ke footer lists forex, commodities, stocks and indices as its markets, and the symbol list on the ExnessKE MT5 account has groups for energies, forex, indices and stocks but none for crypto (23 October 2026). A crypto wallet is listed among the funding methods, which is not the same as trading crypto. We did not count every symbol; the groups are shown below.

On the Standard account we used, the cost of a trade is the spread, with no commission. The spreads table gives two kinds of figure. Exness's published average comes from its spreads and swaps page on exness.ke, read on 23 October 2026. Ours is a single observation, the quotes we saw on the web terminal and the app when we traded on 22 October, not an average. On EUR/USD Standard the two agree, at 0.8 pips, about 0.08 USD on a 0.01 lot ticket. The 0.2 pip minimum on the account set-up screen is a floor, not a typical cost, and on Raw Spread Exness publishes a near-zero spread with a commission instead.

Holding EUR/USD overnight costs a swap: on Standard the same page lists minus 0.56 pips on a long and 0 on a short, which the app's contract specification rounds to minus 0.6. Our trades were intraday and paid none.

Exness offers its own Exness Terminal in the browser and MetaTrader 5 to download, with further options behind an "Other options" menu. We used the Exness Terminal, a web platform with drawing tools, indicators, an economic calendar with impact filters, on-chart HMR news windows, price alerts and a custom indicator editor powered by Indie. The chart can be driven by Exness's own engine or by TradingView, and the platform includes a trading calculator and an economic calendar that can be set to Nairobi (GMT+3) time. Exness also lists a virtual private server (VPS) under its benefits menu. We placed and closed a real EUR/USD trade on the terminal cleanly. exness.ke also lists MetaTrader 4, the MT WebTerminal and the MetaTrader 4 and 5 mobile apps. We did not test MetaTrader 4 or 5.

Kenyan clients trade on the Exness Trade app. We ran the full cycle on it: a deposit, a EUR/USD trade with stop loss, take profit and risk-based sizing, and a withdrawal, plus charts, a watchlist, in-app analytics, Trading Central signals and an economic calendar. Security in the app includes an authenticator, a PIN with an adjustable lock interval, sign-in with biometrics, an option to disable screenshots and a remote log-out. It did the job without any stability problem we could see in testing. The app is in English.

Exness serves Kenya through the CMA-licensed Exness (KE) Limited, with a Nairobi address, funds by M-Pesa and Airtel Money in shillings both ways at no fee, and offers local support, including a Kenyan phone line and live chat. Our trading account was held in US dollars, so M-Pesa amounts were converted each way, but Exness lists the Kenya shilling as an account currency, so a Kenyan trader can choose a shilling account at the start. We have not tested one.

Exness's Help Centre article on trading account currencies (updated 20 October 2026) lists KES for Standard, Pro, Raw Spread and Zero accounts; Standard Cent is offered in cent currencies only. When we asked the live chat on 27 October 2026, Exness's automated assistant said KES is available to clients of the Kenyan entity on Standard, Pro and Raw Spread accounts, and not on Standard Cent. The currency is fixed once an account is created. Our own wallet and trading account were in US dollars, and we have not yet opened a KES account or seen KES in the account-creation dropdown. Our deposit landed first in a US dollar funding wallet, so we cannot yet say whether a shilling account avoids conversion end to end. Swap-free status is not something you apply for. The Client Agreement (Part E, 5.6 and 5.7) says clients from Islamic countries are considered eligible at account opening, and that Exness may assign swap-free status and levels automatically, which is how our account came to show "Qualified". It names no fixed administration fee in place of the swap, saying any swap-free charges appear in the contract specifications or on the website, but Exness can charge swaps retroactively on positions held for a long time, or if it finds the status abused (5.10 and 5.13).

We opened live chat on 22 October 2026 to follow up our rejected proof of address. A bot answered first and explained the rejection; when we asked for an agent at 1:39 PM, it handed us to a named agent in the same minute, whose first reply came at 1:41 PM. The agent checked the case, came back at 1:47 PM with the documents to upload instead, and four minutes later Exness emailed that our proof of residence was verified. When we went quiet, the agent closed the chat, saying support is available 24/7. Exness also lists a support ticket form and a Kenyan phone line, 254 800 720064, and gives support@exness.ke and support@exness.com. On 27 October 2026 Exness's support availability table listed English as online 24/7 and Swahili as online without stated hours; by 2 November the exness.ke contact page listed English and Swahili together as online 24/7. The exness.ke contact page says emails to support@exness.ke are answered within 24 hours and lists no WhatsApp channel. On 27 October 2026 we asked the live chat whether a Kenya shilling account is available: the automated assistant answered at once and linked the Help Centre article. When we asked for a human agent to confirm, it began connecting us, but we did not capture the agent's reply. We tested live chat only.

In the app and the web terminal Exness provides Trading Central trading signals (intraday, short and medium term), FXStreet Market News, Analyst Views, an economic calendar with impact filters that can be set to Nairobi time, per-instrument analytics from hourly to yearly performance, and a top movers list. We reviewed these but did not work through any structured course or webinar. The Resources menu on exness.ke lists analytical tools, an economic calendar, a trading calculator, a currency converter, tick history, VPS hosting and the Born to Trade podcast; it lists no structured course or academy.