Ownership map

What is a broker? The question is: whose fault is this · Nigeria

A trading setup has five owners, and every problem belongs to exactly one of them. Sending a message to the wrong owner does not just waste a day — it produces a polite answer that closes nothing. This page teaches the split.

A broker is the company that holds the account, runs the platform you order through, and moves money in and out of it. It does not own your internet connection, your phone, the payment provider you sent money with, or the market’s opening hours — and those four are where a surprising share of «the broker broke it» actually lives.

The five owners

Who can actually fix what

Each owner, the faults it holds, and the signal that identifies it.
Owner	Faults it holds	How you recognise it
The account	Verification, blocks, transfers between accounts, account type	Fails on every device you try
The platform	Order rejections, quote feed, charts, order history	A message appears in the terminal, with wording
The payment provider	Conversion, transit time, a transfer refused before it arrives	The money left, and no request exists on the account
Your device	Freezes, «no connection», an app that will not start	A second device does the same thing fine
The market	Closed sessions, wide spreads, gaps, thin hours	Everyone sees it, and the clock explains it

The two questions that assign an owner

Does it fail on a second device? If not, the owner is your device — and no message to anyone else will change that. The same account is reachable from the phone app, the browser terminal and the desktop build, so this test takes a minute and settles the question the whole board turns on.

Is there a message with wording in it? A refusal that names a reason belongs to the platform or the account, and the wording routes it. Silence — a spinner, a frozen quote, an app that closes — points at the device or the connection instead.

Run both before writing to anybody. Two answers turn «it does not work» into a sentence that identifies the owner, and support replies to the second kind in one round instead of four.

Boundary cases

Faults that look like one owner and belong to another

The deposit left the sender and never appeared on the account.

While the money is in transit it belongs to the payment provider, and the account has no record to show. The reference number from the sending side is the only document that exists at that stage — collect it before asking anyone. Money that has not arrived.

An order was refused, so the platform must be at fault.

Refusals with wording are the platform reporting a rule, not failing. «Not enough money» and «Invalid volume» are the ticket telling you which box to change. Rejected orders.

A position closed on its own — that has to be a bug.

An automatic close is an account-level rule doing its job when free margin runs out. It is owned by the account, it is documented in advance, and it leaves a record in the history. Protection that did not protect.

The spread widened just as the order went in.

That is the market, and it is visible to everyone trading that instrument at that minute. Rollover and thin hours do it on a schedule. Closed, not broken.

Verification was rejected, so the account is refused.

Documents are checked against what was typed at sign-up. Returned is not rejected: a readable photo, a matching spelling and a current address are what a second attempt should carry. Refused sign-ups.

Money is on the account, but the terminal shows zero.

A Personal Area can hold several trading accounts and a demo. Funds sitting in one place do not appear in another until they are moved, and the move is a deliberate step you take.

What the broker’s own support can do that this site cannot

Support sees the account. It can tell you where a transfer stands, why a document came back, why an order was refused at a specific second, and whether a block exists. It is available around the clock through live chat, email and a help centre, and the current channels are shown inside the Personal Area.

An independent guide can do none of that. What it can do is make sure the message you send is complete, so the first reply is an answer rather than a request for details. That is the whole division of labour here.

This site is not the broker and is not customer support: it holds no money and has no access to any account.

Where the map stops being useful

Two situations have no owner at all, and treating them as faults costs weeks:

A losing trade. The order was carried out as written. There is no side to escalate to, only arithmetic to review afterwards.
A price you disagree with. Quotes differ between providers and between seconds. A screenshot from another website is not evidence of a defect.

Run the sequence

The six checks that assign an owner without any guessing.

Open the sequence

Write the report

What to attach so the owner you picked can act on the first reply.

Report it properly

Test the split

A practice account fails in the same places, at no cost.

Practice account faults

The device test needs a second screen, not a deposit

A demo account signs in from the app, the browser and the desktop build just like a funded one, which makes it a free place to learn the split. The button opens the official exness.com sign-up through a partner link.

Open a free demo at Exness