We are a commercial site, not a charity and not a regulator. You should know how we are paid before you decide how much weight to give anything we publish.
Last reviewed: 9 September 2026.
The short version
2dots is free to read. When we are paid, we are paid by the platforms we write about, through commission on readers who sign up. That is a real conflict of interest. This page sets out what we do to keep it from reaching the verdict, and how you can check whether it worked.
Where the money comes from
Our revenue model is affiliate commission: a platform pays us when a reader who arrived from this site opens an account with it. Payment happens after the reader signs up, and it does not depend on what our review said about the platform.
At the time of writing, this site carries no affiliate links and no sign-up forms. Nothing on any page currently earns us anything. When that changes, the pages that carry a commercial link will say so on the page itself, and this paragraph will be updated to describe what is actually running.
We do not take payment for any of the following, and we will say so plainly if that ever changes:
- Placement. Nobody pays to appear in our review list or to rank higher in it.
- Verdicts. Nobody pays for a status, a rating, or a favourable summary.
- Removal. Nobody pays to have a review, a warning or a regulator citation taken down.
- Coverage of a topic. We do not accept commissions to write about a subject chosen by an advertiser.
What the money does not buy
The verdict at the top of every review is derived from documents, not from commercial relationships. A platform is marked as carrying a regulator warning when a regulator has published one naming that platform or its website address. That statement is either true or false on the day we check it, and a payment cannot make it false.
This is the practical test: several of the platforms we review carry warnings from the UK Financial Conduct Authority, Spain’s CNMV, Australia’s ASIC and other regulators. Those warnings are printed on the page in the same place whether or not the platform is a commercial partner. If commission were setting our verdicts, those pages would not read the way they do.
Why we publish verdicts that cost us money
A platform marked “Avoid” is a platform most readers will not sign up with, which means it is a platform that will not pay us. We publish that verdict anyway, for two reasons.
The first is legal. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission’s rules on endorsements and on consumer reviews require that material connections be disclosed and prohibit misrepresenting a review as independent when it is not. A site that sold its verdicts and hid it would be breaking those rules.
The second is that a review nobody can rely on is worth nothing to anybody, including us. The only durable asset a review site has is that its verdicts survive checking.
How to hold us to this
You do not have to take our word for any of it. Everything we assert about a platform’s regulatory standing comes from public registers and warning lists that you can search yourself, for free, in a few minutes. Every review lists the registers we checked and the date we checked them, and our guide to verifying a platform walks through the same checks step by step.
If you find a claim on this site that does not hold up, write to [email protected] with the page and the specific claim. Factual corrections are made on the page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a platform pay to get a good review on 2dots?
No. Payment does not change a verdict. A platform named on a regulator’s warning list is marked as such whether or not it pays us, and no platform can buy the removal of a warning, a change of status, or a more favourable summary.
Do you take money to remove a negative review?
No. We have never removed a review in exchange for payment and we will not. If a review contains a factual error we correct the error and record the correction, which is a different thing from taking it down.
How can I tell whether a page on this site is paid for?
Every page that carries a commercial link shows a disclosure directly under the verdict, before the review text begins. If a page does not carry that disclosure, it carries no commercial link.
Does 2dots operate any trading platform?
No. We publish reviews of platforms operated by other companies. We do not run any of them, we do not hold client funds, and we do not accept deposits.