AFS Authorised Representative Check — ASIC Authorised & Credit Representative Screening

Check any name against ASIC's AFS Authorised Representative register and Credit Representative register, get the appointing licensee named, and get a straight answer to the question that matters: is this appointment live today?

Background-screening vendors sell this as two separate manual products at about A$36 per name each, with a one-day turnaround. This Actor answers both registers for a fraction of that, in seconds, in bulk, from ASIC's own published data.

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The thing almost every AFS authorised representative search gets wrong

ASIC publishes the AFS Authorised Representative dataset under the label "Current". It is not a list of current appointments. It is the full appointment history with a status column.

Measured on the 2026-07 release:

	rows
Total appointments in the "Current" file	362,206
Status Ceased	309,807 (85.5%)
Status Current	52,399

So a tool that answers "found on the AFS Authorised Representative register" is wrong about currency roughly five times out of six — and wrong in the direction that reports someone as authorised to provide financial services years after ASIC records that they stopped.

Every match this Actor returns carries isCurrent, asicStatus, startDate and endDate. Set statusFilter to current and you get only live appointments; set it to ceased and you get exactly the record you need to verify claimed past experience.

The two registers have opposite rules, and that is the second trap

Same regulator, same portal, same release month, opposite conventions:

	AFS Authorised Representative	Credit Representative
Rows (2026-07)	362,206	47,731
Status column	AFS_REP_STATUS = Current / Ceased	none at all
End dates	on every ceased row	blank on all 47,731 rows
What the file contains	full history	current appointments only

Apply the AFS rule to the credit file and every credit representative comes back "status unknown". Apply the credit rule to the AFS file and 309,807 ceased appointments read as live. This Actor gives each register its own currency rule and asserts that rule against the file on every run — the day ASIC changes either convention, the run fails loudly instead of quietly inverting an answer.

The licensee is named, not just numbered

The registers carry only the licence number of the appointing licensee. That is the least useful field on the row: nobody is screening 000226403, they are screening Australian Life Insurance Distribution Pty Ltd.

This Actor joins to ASIC's AFS Licensee and Credit Licensee registers and returns the licensee's name — which is the whole point of the check, since what a buyer is verifying is who this person is authorised to act for.

There is a trap buried in that join, and it is the reason to use this rather than roll your own: licence numbers are zero-padded to nine digits in the representative files (000226403) and unpadded in the licensee files (226403). Join them as published and 0 of 52,399 current appointments resolve — every row comes back "licensee unknown", a confident, complete-looking, entirely empty answer. After normalising, 52,387 of 52,399 resolve. The Actor checks that ratio on every run and refuses to return results if it collapses.

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What you get back

One row per name you supply:

{
  "referenceId": "2",
  "queryName": "Godfrey, Lee",
  "queryType": "person",
  "status": "ok",
  "matchCount": 3,
  "currentAppointments": 2,
  "ceasedAppointments": 1,
  "isCurrentlyAuthorised": true,
  "matches": [
    {
      "register": "Credit Representative",
      "matchConfidence": "name_exact",
      "registerName": "GODFREY, LEE",
      "representativeNumber": "434944",
      "licenceNumber": "385325",
      "licenseeName": "SMARTLINE OPERATIONS PTY LIMITED",
      "licenseeResolved": true,
      "startDate": "2013-02-25",
      "endDate": null,
      "isCurrent": true,
      "authorisations": ["Different to Appointing Rep"]
    }
    // ... plus the ceased 2004-2005 AFS appointment, labelled ceased
  ],
  "verdict": "2 current appointment(s) on Credit Representative. ...",
  "limitations": "..."
}

Matches are sorted strongest claim first (name_exact, organisation_exact, name_partial, name_fuzzy), current before ceased, so the first row is always the one you would read first anyway.

A same-surname hit is never allowed to answer the question

This one was found by testing rather than reasoned about, and it is worth stating plainly. A check on Gary Robert Smith — whose two appointments both ended in 2006 — turns up 58 current appointments held by unrelated Smiths. Let those vote and the tool reports him as currently authorised, which is the error that gets someone hired.

So the determination is computed from name_exact / organisation_exact matches only:

field	counts
confirmedNameMatches, currentAppointments, ceasedAppointments, isCurrentlyAuthorised	exact name matches only
possibleOtherMatches, possibleOtherMatchesCurrent	same surname or close spelling — shown for review, never treated as this person

Both are returned. Nothing is hidden from a screener; the weaker tier simply cannot move the answer. isCurrentlyAuthorised: false means no current appointment under this name — never a claim about anyone else.

For AFS appointments you also get the authorisations actually granted (financial product advice, dealing, general advice, underwriting, operating a registered scheme, wholesale clients …), the cross-endorsing licensees (AFS_REP_CROSS_ENDORSE is a ~-separated list — up to six other licensees relying on the same authorisation), and whether the representative may appoint sub-representatives.

One representative number can hold several simultaneous appointments — up to eight measured on the current file. All of them are returned; nothing is collapsed to "the licensee".

Input

{
  "records": [
    { "referenceId": "1", "firstName": "Gary", "middleName": "Robert", "lastName": "Smith" },
    { "referenceId": "2", "firstName": "Lee", "lastName": "Godfrey" },
    { "referenceId": "3", "organisationName": "Deegan Marine Pty Ltd" }
  ],
  "registers": "both",
  "statusFilter": "all",
  "fuzzyThreshold": 0.88
}

Case, punctuation and the order of given names do not matter. ASIC stores individuals as SURNAME, GIVEN NAMES; that conversion is done for you.

It fails loudly rather than returning a confident empty result

A screening tool that answers "nothing found" because its source was broken is worse than one that crashes. Before a single name is checked — and before anything is billed — the run verifies that:

1. every file is present in ASIC's CKAN catalogue and resolved at runtime (the filename carries a YYYYMM stamp and changes monthly — a hardcoded URL is a time bomb);
2. the header of each file matches ASIC's published schema column by column;
3. the delimiter is what it should be — the AFS files are tab-delimited despite being served as .csv, and a default CSV reader turns 362,206 rows into one undivided column and silently finds nothing;
4. row counts clear their floors (250,000 AFS / 30,000 credit / 3,000 AFS licensees / 2,000 credit licensees);
5. the AFS status vocabulary is still exactly {Current, Ceased};
6. the credit file is still current-only, so a blank end date may still be read as a live appointment;
7. at least 95% of current AFS appointments still resolve to a named licensee — the zero-padding canary;
8. every dataset was republished within the last 100 days.

If any check fails the run stops with the reason. Nothing is charged for a run that could not answer, and a record with no usable name comes back status: "error" — treat as unchecked, not as clear — and is not billed.

Honest limits — read before you rely on this

• A name match is not an identity match. ASIC publishes no date of birth on these registers. Confirm the representative number and licensee before acting; the verifyAt field links to ASIC Connect.
• A no-match is not a clearance. ASIC records a representative under the name held at the time of appointment. A former name or a different spelling will not be found.
• This is not a Financial Advisers Register check. The FAR is a separate, smaller register covering personal advice on relevant financial products to retail clients. This Actor covers the AFS Authorised Representative and Credit Representative registers — the two that vendors price per name.
• It is not a banned-and-disqualified check, not a criminal record check and not a bankruptcy check. Being on the representative register says a licensee appointed you; it says nothing about enforcement action.
• The data is a monthly snapshot published by ASIC, not a live feed. The exact release date of every file used is returned on each row in sourceReleases.

Source and licence

ASIC's AFS Authorised Representative, Credit Representative, AFS Licensee and Credit Licensee datasets, published on data.gov.au under CC BY 3.0 AU. No login, no API key, no scraping — the Actor reads the published files through the CKAN API.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by ASIC.