Named analysts. Real testing. Auditable reviews.
Every broker review on TIC is written by a named analyst, checked by a named editor, and scored against a public methodology. No ghostwriters, no AI-generated reviews, no anonymous verdicts. These are the people behind the ratings.
Core editorial team
The four analysts below are responsible for every broker rating published on TIC. Each owns a specific part of the methodology, and every review carries a named writer, a named editor, and a publication date.
Daniel Amaro
Daniel leads broker testing at TIC. He spent over a decade reviewing CFD and forex brokers at international comparison sites before joining TIC, with hands-on testing of more than 140 brokers across his career. At TIC he owns the overall scoring model, the live-account testing protocol, and final sign-off on every broker rating.
Category ownership: overall score, Platform & Tools, testing protocol.
Claire Mercer
Claire runs TIC’s fact-checking process and edits every broker review before publication. She brings 15 years of financial editing experience at consumer finance titles in the UK and Southern Africa, with a specialism in verifying regulatory claims against primary-source registers. Every numeric claim on TIC passes through her three-source rule: no fact is published unless it can be confirmed by three independent sources, one of which must be primary.
Category ownership: fact-checking, corrections policy, source verification, Support & Service scoring.
Joseph Otieno
Joseph verifies every licence claim on TIC against the official regulator register — not against the broker’s website. He has more than 10 years of experience tracking broker regulation, including hands-on work with the main African regulators (CMA Kenya, CMSA Tanzania, FSCA South Africa) and the offshore regimes most used by African retail clients (Mauritius, Seychelles, St. Vincent). He is responsible for TIC’s four-tier regulator scoring system and our published regulator tier list.
Category ownership: Regulation & Safety (25% of every score), regulator tier assignments, licence verification.
Amina Kimaro
Amina tests the payment rails that matter to African clients. She has 8 years of experience in African mobile money and payments — M-Pesa (Kenya and Tanzania), Airtel Money, Tigo Pesa, and local bank transfer into broker accounts. For every broker TIC reviews, Amina completes a real deposit and a real withdrawal through at least one local payment method, and times both to the minute.
Category ownership: Payments & Withdrawals, Africa-fit score, local market testing.
Contributors & specialists
TIC works with a small group of external contributors for specific topics. Contributors are disclosed at the top of any article they write, and their articles pass through the same editing and fact-checking process as our core team’s work.
Scam-pattern research
A rotating group of reader-submitted tip-offs, WhatsApp group monitors, and volunteer investigators in Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa feed TIC’s scam-pattern coverage. All submissions are verified before publication.
Legal & regulatory review
Independent legal counsel reviews TIC’s terms of use, disclaimer, and published regulator claims on a quarterly basis. Counsel does not edit editorial content.
Platform testing volunteers
Volunteer traders in our reader community run secondary platform tests — app stability, execution speed, chart functionality — on the brokers we review. Their findings feed into the Platform & Tools score but do not replace core-team testing.
How our team works
One named writer, one named editor
Every article on TIC shows the writer’s name at the top and the editor’s name at the bottom. If something is wrong, you know exactly who is responsible for fixing it.
No AI-written reviews
AI may assist with research or summarisation, but no broker review on TIC is written by AI. Every rating is the judgement of a named human analyst after live-account testing.
No commercial team in editorial
TIC’s affiliate and commercial team is structurally separate from the editorial team. Writers do not know commission rates. Commercial staff do not edit reviews.
The full standards are in our editorial guidelines and our methodology.
Work with us
TIC is hiring freelance broker analysts, fact-checkers, and African-market payment testers. We look for people with direct broker-testing experience, strong source-handling discipline, and a reader-first attitude. We do not hire writers whose portfolio consists of sponsored or paid-placement content.
To pitch a contribution, apply for a freelance role, or flag a scam pattern you have seen, email editorial@tic.co.tz or use our contact page.