The Spreadex sister sites in a nutshell
Spreadex Limited runs the only betting account in Britain that combines sports spread betting, regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, with ordinary fixed odds under Gambling Commission licence 8835. It has exactly one sister site: Sporting Index, profiled below alongside four licensed alternatives worth comparing: Betfair, Star Sports, William Hill and Paddy Power.
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At a glance
Brand
Spreadex at spreadex.com, established 1999; one site split between sports betting and financial trading
Operator
Spreadex Limited, company 03720378, a privately owned St Albans firm since 1999
UKGC licence
8835 for fixed odds, betting since 2009; the spread betting side answers to the FCA
Best sister sites
Sporting Index, its one and only, currently under a CMA order to be sold
Regulatory record
One action: a £2,022,000 penalty decided May 2025, with co-operation noted
Welcome offer
Bet £10, get £60 in free bets, half fixed odds and half spread bets
Payments
Debit cards, Apple and Google Pay, Pay by Bank, even cheques; £5 minimums
Last checked
8 September 2026
The Spreadex sister site and alternatives
One profile below is true family, and four are separately owned comparisons, chosen because each offers a different reason a bettor might be looking beyond Spreadex.
Sporting Index
- Relationship: The one true Spreadex sister site, for now; Spreadex bought its consumer business in 2023, and the UKGC lists Sporting Index Limited, account 27343, at Spreadex’s St Albans address.
- Living on borrowed time: The competition authority has accepted final undertakings requiring the business to change hands, with the last legal challenge closed off in June 2026, so its next owner won’t be Spreadex.
- The older brand: Sporting Index has been the other name in sports spread betting since 1992, and for many spread bettors it was the first account they ever opened.
- A twin in every way: Today it runs on Spreadex’s platform with the same markets, the same £60 welcome offer and the same promotions, dressed in navy where Spreadex wears black.
- Best for: Spread bettors who prefer a heritage name, and anyone curious to compare the twins while comparison is still possible.
Betfair
- Relationship: An alternative, not a sister site; Flutter Entertainment’s exchange brand, run by PPB Entertainment Limited on Gambling Commission licence 39426.
- The other clever way to bet: Backing and laying against other bettors at market-set prices is the closest licensed relative to the spread betting mindset, without the losses-beyond-your-stake mechanics.
- Depth on tap: Exchange liquidity on racing and football gives price-sensitive bettors the control Spreadex’s fixed-odds book decides for them.
- A crowd, not a trading room: Where Spreadex quotes you its own price from St Albans, the exchange lets you name yours and wait to be matched.
- Best for: Numbers-first bettors who like the risk dial spread betting offers but want their maximum loss fixed the moment the bet is struck.
Star Sports
- Relationship: An alternative on its own licence; Star Racing Limited of Hove, licence 9177, betting online since 2010.
- The phone-first way: A racing bookmaker built around a personal relationship with its bettors, the nearest thing in fixed odds to Spreadex’s staffed sports desk.
- Racing as the main course: Star boosts and big-stake racing service where Spreadex divides its attention between sport and the financial markets.
- Casino included: Unlike Spreadex, which has closed its casino, Star Sports still runs casino and live casino tabs beside the sportsbook.
- Best for: Serious racing bettors who want an independent bookmaker that answers the phone and takes a proper bet.
William Hill
- Relationship: An alternative within the Evoke plc group; WHG (International) Limited, licence 39225, with every betting activity on one licence since 2014.
- Heritage to match: One of the few betting names older than the spread betting industry itself, for bettors who rate longevity the way Spreadex’s Est. 1999 masthead invites them to.
- Everything under one roof: Sports, Vegas, casino, bingo and poker inside one account, a breadth the sports-only Spreadex no longer attempts to match.
- A racing desk with depth: Market coverage and each-way terms honed over decades, where Spreadex’s edge is the exotic markets rather than the everyday ones.
- Best for: Bettors who want one household name account that covers everything, with tradition doing the reassuring.
Paddy Power
- Relationship: A separately owned alternative from the Flutter Entertainment stable, run by PPB Games Limited on licence 39411 with no regulatory actions recorded.
- The opposite temperament: Spreadex sells precision and trading room seriousness; Paddy Power sells mischief, money-back specials and telly-ad theatre, and both are valid ways to enjoy a punt.
- Promotions with a pulse: A rolling calendar of specials and refunds, whereas the Spreadex suite, strong as it is, keeps to the same standing offers year-round.
- Group scale: Flutter’s resources fund app polish and market breadth that a private St Albans firm chooses not to chase.
- Best for: Bettors comparing this Spreadex sister site guide’s serious end with betting as entertainment, refunds, jokes and all.
How this Spreadex review was made
Every claim here comes from a source I can point you to, so you can judge the page on its evidence. My full approach is on the About Us page.
Rob Hill
Personally tested from a UK connection: offer figures come from each promotion’s published terms rather than its advertising; corporate and competition history comes from official public records; and regulatory detail is confirmed with the regulator itself. Where documents disagree with marketing, both versions are quoted. Account opened, deposit made.
8 September 2026, on a Windows laptop using Google Chrome
Spreadex Limited, company 03720378, named in the site’s footer with both regulators’ credentials
8835
The spreadex.com site: the split front page, the sports betting site, the offers page and each offer’s own terms, the payment information pages, both complaints procedures, the Why Spreadex page and the casino closure notice; the Gambling Commission register entries for licences 8835, 27343, 39426, 39411, 39225 and 9177, all tabs including the regulatory actions; the CMA’s Spreadex / Sporting Index merger inquiry case page on gov.uk; Companies House records for Spreadex Limited and Spreadex.Com Limited, including control; the live Sporting Index site and its offers page; the live Star Sports site; Trustpilot; google.co.uk results; our Betfair, Star Sports, William Hill and Paddy Power reviews.
8 September 2026, first published version
One account, two regulators
The homepage of spreadex.com is split down the middle: sports betting on the left, financial trading on the right, “All trading involves risk” underneath. Go through the sports side, and you find the thing no other British bookmaker offers: spread betting and fixed odds priced side by side in the same market rows. On an in-play football match, you can back a team at ordinary odds, or buy and sell Total Goals at a two-way price the way a trader buys and sells an index. The legal plumbing follows the bet type: fixed odds sit under Gambling Commission licence8835, while the spread bets are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and the site’s footer explains the split in two sentences.
The split regulation is necessary because spread betting is a different animal. Get a Total Goals buy wrong in a goalless bore, and you lose a multiple of your stake; the site shows “Spread betting losses can exceed deposit” beneath its own promotional banners, and opening the spread account at all requires passing an appropriateness assessment. To its credit, Spreadex builds for that learning curve: there’s a Training Centre, a spread betting glossary, OPTA definitions for its player performance markets, and even a dedicated client vulnerability page. The market menu rewards the effort, running from racing and greyhounds through cricket, golf and politics, with streaming on racing and a virtuals tab besides.
The fixed-odds side, by contrast, works like any modern sportsbook, and since the casino closed, the sports really are the whole show. The company’s goodbye note at spreadex.com/casino says it in plain English: “We’ve decided to focus fully on delivering the best possible sports betting experience.” What remains is a bookmaker with a trading room where the games lobby used to be.
Ownership, licensing and the fight over Sporting Index
UKGC Licensed, Spreadex Limited (8835), click to verify
Spreadex Limited was incorporated in February 1999, founded by former City trader Jonathan Hufford, and has stayed private for its whole life: Companies House shows the operating company is owned by Spreadex.Com Limited, a 1998 company at the same Churchill House address, whose registered controller is Peter Woodstock Harris, born in 1934, holding between 25% and 50%. The register lists seven trading names, one domain and a remote betting licence held since January 2009. There’s also one regulatory action on the record, and it’s a serious one: on 7 May 2025 the Commission imposed a warning, a £2,022,000 financial penalty and an additional licence condition over failings between September 2022 and November 2023, covering anti-money-laundering controls and customer interaction, with the register noting that Spreadex co-operated throughout. The casino the AML findings partly concerned has since been shut down, which may have been a response to the issue.
Then there’s the fight that defines the family. In late 2023 Spreadex bought the consumer business of Sporting Index, the only other sports spread betting firm in Britain, from its French owner. The Competition and Markets Authority opened a merger inquiry within weeks and has never let go: an in-depth investigation found the deal would reduce the number of specialist providers from two to one, the CMA ordered a sale in November 2024, Spreadex fought through a tribunal remittal and lost again in the re-run, final undertakings to sell were accepted on 3 October 2025, and the appeals ran out when the Competition Appeal Tribunal refused permission in April 2026 and the Court of Appeal did the same, on an expedited basis, on 5 June 2026. A CMA remedy group and a monitoring trustee now oversee the process. Simply put, Spreadex owns its only sister site under an obligation to sell it to a new owner.
Until that sale completes, the two brands are as close as two bookmakers can be. Sporting Index runs on Spreadex’s platform from Spreadex’s address, its logo is served from Spreadex’s image servers, and its offers page lists the Spreadex promotions word for word. One of this summer’s Trustpilot reviews complains that the two firms “have made the same prices in all markets”, which is the customer’s-eye view of exactly the concern the CMA spent two and a half years litigating. GAMSTOP covers both brands; self-exclusion at one doesn’t automatically carry to the other, since the licences are separate.
Bonuses: a £60 welcome offer that pays £61 if you take the harder half
The welcome offer works in two halves. Place a £10 fixed-odds single, or £10 each-way, at odds of 1/2 or better within 28 days of joining, and you get £30 back as three £10 free fixed-odds bets, dripped on consecutive days. The second £30 only unlocks if you also open the full spread betting account, which means passing that appropriateness assessment: it then pays three £5 Total Goals football spread bets, three £5 Winning Favourites racing spread bets and a £1 Race Index spread bet. Add it up, and the spread side actually delivers £31, making £61 in all on a £60 headline, a rounding error in the customer’s favour for once. Free bet stakes aren’t returned with winnings, everything expires after 28 days, and the offer page notes that it’s been running since March 2025 with no end date, so there’s no rush.
The standing suite is an old-school bookmaker’s set, and two things here are comfortably better than the market standard. First Past The Post here comes with a rare second promise: if a horse passes the post first and is then demoted for interference, Spreadex pays both the original and the promoted winner. And the “2nd To A Rag” insurance refunds your stake as a free bet when your horse finishes second to a 33/1-or-bigger shock winner, which is the kind of hard-luck story every racing bettor knows by heart. Alongside them run a football accumulator boost rising to 100% on the biggest accas, daily price boosts benchmarked for value, 2-Up early payout on football, and double the odds on your single winner when a Lucky 15, 31 or 63 nearly comes off.
Payments: two-hour card withdrawals from a firm that still takes cheques
The payment page reads like a company that has added every new era’s methods without deleting the old ones. Deposits can come from UK debit cards from a £5 minimum, bank transfer with the firm’s own account details listed on the page, Apple Pay and Google Pay, instant Pay by Bank transfers in both directions, and, remarkably, cheques made payable to Spreadex Ltd. There’s even a Direct Debit arrangement tied to weekly Tuesday statements, a survival from the credit-account tradition that tells you what kind of bookmaker this grew up as. The one gap is e-wallets: no PayPal, and the refusal note still name-checks Moneybookers and Ukash, services that stopped existing under those names a decade ago.
Withdrawals are where the trading room machinery shows its worth. The minimum is £5 of cleared funds not supporting an open position; card withdrawals arrive within two hours of approval for most issuers, with two to five days as the fallback where a bank can’t accept the faster method, and bank transfers run within two working days. If you’re moving serious money, there’s a CHAPS same-day option for a £25 fee, with a 10am cut-off for amounts over £50,000, and card withdrawals cap at £25,000 per transaction while allowing several in a day. Everything returns to the source: same card, own-name accounts only, no third parties anywhere.
The language used might need a bit of translation for ordinary bettors: balances live on a “trading ledger”, and money tied up as margin on open spread positions isn’t withdrawable until those positions close. That’s normal for a spread firm and irrelevant if you stick to fixed odds. As a cashier, this is one of the fastest and most flexible payment set-ups in current British betting, offered by a company whose payment page also mentions cheques being posted out on request. Quite the paradox.
Support and complaints
Support is properly staffed and listed: a freephone sports desk phone on 08000 526 575, a general line on +44 (0)1727 895 000, live chat, and confirmed email addresses for the trading room at sports@spreadex.com and the back office at info@spreadex.com. Phone service isn’t just for handling problems – deposits, withdrawals, and even bets can be handled by a call agent, and the trading room answers market queries directly. Plenty of current bookmakers offer nothing beyond a login-walled chat widget, and the contact page alone puts Spreadex in a different class.
Complaints run down two separate tracks, and knowing which is which is important. A fixed-odds dispute follows the Gambling Commission route: customer services first, then a written review by the compliance department with a full response within eight weeks, taking guidance from the Commission and from IBAS, and complaints should be raised within six months. A spread betting dispute is a financial services complaint and, if unresolved after the firm’s final response, can be taken to the Financial Ombudsman Service, with six months to refer it. Same account, same website, two different referees depending on which kind of bet went wrong, which is the price of the dual-regulated design and worth understanding before you need it.
Spreadex’s reputation
The player review record is long, active and mostly positive. The Spreadex Trustpilot profile, claimed since 2014 and on a paid subscription, stands at 4.4 from 2,269 reviews with 572 arriving in the last twelve months, two thirds of them five-star against 12% one-star, and the company answers three quarters of its negative reviews. Recent praise centres on the site’s clarity and how openly it flags volatile markets, which matches what the Training Centre and glossary suggest about the firm’s attitude to its own product. The site’s homepage widget shows the score too, with the caveat that it selectively displays only the four-and five-star reviews.
The exceptions are worth reading closely. One August 2026 reviewer describes a rude call about repaying money owed, a reminder that credit facilities exist here and bring collection calls with them; the company’s reply says the matter was reviewed and internal action taken. Another states that since the Sporting Index purchase “the 2 firms have made the same prices in all markets”, the market power complaint in miniature. And the £2,022,000 penalty covered in the licensing section belongs in any full picture of the record, recent as it is. None of this reads like a bookmaker that doesn’t pay; it reads like a serious firm whose sharp edges are exactly where the terms and conditions say they are.
What I like, and what I don’t
What I like
- A product nobody else in Britain offers: spread betting and fixed odds in one account, with real education around the risky half.
- Two-hour card withdrawals, £5 minimums, Pay by Bank both ways and a phone desk that takes bets and payments.
- First Past The Post that pays both winners on a demotion, and stake-back insurance when your horse is second to a 33/1 shock.
- A 27-year-old private company with a large, active, mostly positive review history.
What I don’t
- A £2,022,000 penalty as recently as May 2025 is a serious mark on an otherwise long, clean record.
- Spread betting losses can exceed your deposit, and the welcome offer actively walks newcomers towards that product.
- Owning the only rival means a spread bettor currently has nowhere meaningfully different to price-shop, until the ordered sale lands.
- No PayPal or e-wallets, and help pages that still cite payment brands from a decade ago.
My Spreadex sister sites verdict: a serious firm, briefly a monopoly
Spreadex is the most distinctive bookmaker I’ve reviewed in a while. The product is unique and clearly signposted, the cashier is faster and more flexible than firms twenty times its size, support still involves human beings on freephone numbers, and player feedback is the kind a company earns over decades rather than buys in a launch quarter. The downsides are just as striking: a £2m regulatory penalty imposed last year, a product on the spread side that can cost more than you staked, and the strange present moment in which the firm owns the only alternative to itself, with the same prices on both sites, while a court-confirmed sale order works through the machinery.
For a racing or football bettor who wants fixed odds with old-fashioned service, Spreadex earns your consideration on the payments and the sports desk alone, and the curious will find the spread side an education if they treat the free spread bets as tuition. If you’d rather wait out the ownership issue, Sporting Index offers the same experience under the older name; Betfair suits the numbers-minded with capped downside; Star Sports matches the phone-first approach; and William Hill and Paddy Power cover breadth and fun respectively. Check back once the CMA’s remedy completes, because this brand’s family tree is going to change.
Spreadex sister sites FAQ: your questions answered
What are Spreadex’s sister sites?
Just one: Sporting Index, the other British sports spread betting firm, whose consumer business Spreadex bought in 2023. It still trades on Spreadex’s platform today, but the CMA has accepted final undertakings requiring it to be sold, and the Court of Appeal refused Spreadex’s last challenge in June 2026, so the family is due to shrink to just Spreadex.
Who owns Spreadex?
Spreadex Limited, a private St Albans company founded in 1999 by former City trader Jonathan Hufford. Companies House shows it held through Spreadex.Com Limited, whose registered controller is Peter Woodstock Harris with a 25% to 50% stake. No plc, no group, no overseas parent.
Is Spreadex safe and licensed?
It’s doubly regulated: fixed odds under Gambling Commission licence 8835, held since 2009, and spread betting under the Financial Conduct Authority. The register shows one action: a £2,022,000 penalty decided in May 2025 for anti-money-laundering and customer-interaction failings, with co-operation noted. GAMSTOP applies, and disputes end at IBAS for fixed odds or the Financial Ombudsman Service for spread bets.
How is spread betting different from fixed odds at Spreadex?
A fixed-odds bet can only lose its stake. A spread bet settles on how right or wrong you were: buy Total Goals at 2.45 for £5 a goal and a five-goal thriller pays handsomely, while a goalless draw costs you several times your stake. That’s why the spread side is FCA-regulated, gated behind an appropriateness test, and comes with the site’s own warning that losses can exceed your deposit.
What happens to Sporting Index now?
It keeps trading as normal while the CMA-supervised sale process runs; accounts, balances and GAMSTOP protections are unaffected. The undertakings require the business to pass to a new owner, so at some point its platform, prices or promotions may diverge from Spreadex’s.