An Italian trader types a broker's domain, and the browser returns nothing. Not a slow page, not a maintenance notice. Nothing. Somewhere upstream, an internet provider has been told by CONSOB to stop resolving that address, and the order applies to every consumer connection in the country.
This is the sharpest instrument the Commissione Nazionale per le Societa e la Borsa holds, and it is the reason Italy behaves differently from most other European markets. Elsewhere a regulator publishes a warning and hopes people read it. In Italy the regulator can remove the site from view.
What CONSOB actually supervises
CONSOB is the market conduct authority for Italy. It authorises and supervises investment firms, oversees prospectuses and public offers, polices market abuse on Borsa Italiana, and enforces the conduct rules that come out of MiFID II. Prudential supervision of banks sits with the Banca d'Italia instead, which is why an Italian bank offering investment services answers to both.
For a retail broker the relevant path is the one every EU firm knows. Either the firm holds an Italian investment firm authorisation, or it holds an equivalent authorisation elsewhere in the European Economic Area and passports in. Passporting is what lets a Cypriot or Maltese firm serve Italian clients without a second licence, and it is also what determines who handles a complaint: the home regulator supervises the firm, CONSOB supervises conduct on Italian soil.
Anything outside those two routes is unauthorised, and unauthorised is where the blocking powers begin.
The register, the warning list and the blackout list
CONSOB publishes three different things and firms confuse them constantly.
The first is the register of authorised intermediaries. If a firm is licensed in Italy or has notified a passport, it appears here with its permissions. This is the document a prospective client should be checking, in the same way a UK client checks the FCA register. The mechanics are the same everywhere, and we walked through them in how to check a broker licence.
The second is the warning list. CONSOB names entities it believes are offering investment services in Italy without authorisation, along with clone sites that copy the branding of licensed firms. Warnings from CONSOB also feed into the shared European alert channels, so a name published in Rome tends to appear in other national lists within weeks.
The third is the blackout list: the set of domains CONSOB has ordered internet service providers to block. That power came out of Italian legislation passed in 2019 and it has been used steadily since. The list grows month by month and it is public, which makes it a useful research tool. If a competitor's domain is on it, the reason is on the record.
A blocking order attaches to a domain, not to a company. Firms that respond by spinning up a new domain usually find the replacement blocked as well, and the pattern of repeat domains is itself evidence when the file eventually reaches a court.
Why Italy is strict about leverage and marketing
Italy adopted the ESMA product intervention measures and kept them after the temporary EU-wide rules lapsed. That means the familiar retail structure: capped leverage by asset class, margin close-out at a fixed level of required margin, mandatory negative balance protection, and a standardised risk warning carrying the firm's own percentage of losing retail accounts. The mechanics of those caps are the same ones described in the ESMA leverage caps guide.
The marketing side matters just as much. Binary options cannot be sold to Italian retail clients. CFD promotion has to carry the loss figure, cannot imply that trading is easy or low risk, and cannot dangle a bonus in exchange for a deposit. Bonus structures are treated as an inducement problem across most of Europe now, a subject we covered in the bonus bans article.
None of this is unusual by European standards. What is unusual is the enforcement route. A firm that ignores the marketing rules in some jurisdictions receives a letter. In Italy the letter can be followed by an order that removes the firm from the Italian internet.
Reverse solicitation is not a strategy
Firms outside the EEA routinely tell themselves that Italian clients who signed up on their own initiative fall outside the rules. The exemption is real, and it is narrow. It covers a client who genuinely approached the firm with no prompting. It does not cover Italian-language landing pages, Italian payment methods, affiliates buying Italian keywords, or a Telegram channel run in Italian.
CONSOB looks at the same evidence any European regulator looks at when it tests this: language, currency, targeting and local payment rails. We set out the full test in the reverse solicitation guide, and the practical conclusion holds for Italy more than anywhere. If your acquisition funnel speaks Italian, you are marketing into Italy.
What this means for a firm planning Italian growth
Decide early which of two shapes you want. Either you take an EEA authorisation and passport in properly, accept the leverage caps and the marketing restrictions, and build the client portal to match. Or you geo-block Italy at the top of the funnel, including affiliate traffic, and you accept that the market is closed to you.
The middle path, running offshore and hoping nobody in Rome notices, has a predictable ending. The domain goes dark, the affiliates stop being paid, and any payment processor with European exposure starts asking questions. Card acquirers watch national blocking lists precisely because a blocked merchant is a chargeback problem waiting to happen.
On the technology side the Italian requirements are ordinary configuration work rather than a rebuild. Leverage tiers per client category, a risk warning that renders the firm's current loss percentage, appropriateness testing before an account goes live, and audit records showing which version of the terms each client accepted. Any modern broker CRM should hold those as per-jurisdiction settings rather than hard-coded values, because the values change and you do not want a code deployment every time they do.
Italy is a large retail market with real demand and a regulator that acts quickly. Those two facts are related. The firms that do well there treat the CONSOB register as a shop window and the blackout list as the price of getting it wrong.
"If your site is on the CONSOB blackout list, no marketing budget fixes it. Italian traffic simply stops arriving and support gets a week of angry emails."
— Roman Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- CONSOB supervises conduct for investment services in Italy, while the Banca d'Italia handles prudential supervision of banks.
- Three separate CONSOB publications matter: the register of authorised intermediaries, the warning list of suspected unauthorised firms, and the list of blocked domains.
- Italy kept the ESMA-style retail rules: leverage caps, margin close-out, negative balance protection and a standardised risk warning.
- Italian-language marketing, Italian payment methods and Italian affiliate traffic defeat any reverse solicitation argument.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can CONSOB really block a broker's website in Italy?
Yes. Under Italian legislation introduced in 2019, CONSOB can order internet service providers to block access to the websites of entities offering investment services in Italy without authorisation. The blocked domains are published, and the order applies to consumer connections across the country.
Does an EU licence let a broker serve Italian clients?
An authorisation from another European Economic Area regulator can be passported into Italy after the correct notification. The home regulator keeps prudential supervision, while CONSOB supervises conduct on Italian territory and enforces the local marketing and leverage rules.
What leverage limits apply to Italian retail clients?
Italy applies the ESMA-style product intervention framework, which caps retail leverage by asset class, requires margin close-out at a set level of required margin and mandates negative balance protection. Professional clients who meet the qualifying tests fall outside those retail caps.
About the Author
Roman Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals side by side with his brother Alex Onta, and he helped on the design of eTrader, the division Alex built and leads. His ground is worldwide payment processing, AML compliance and the corporate structures brokers are built on, work the two of them carry together, shaped by executive roles in the UAE and international corporates. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.