Financial Adviser Register New Zealand — FSPR Check

Look up any person or company on New Zealand's Financial Service Providers Register (FSPR) and get back what the register actually says about them: the categories of financial service they are registered to provide, whether each one is current or historical, the licence status and licensing authority where the register records one, and the dispute resolution scheme that covers them.

Built for pre-employment screening, adviser onboarding, AML/CFT due diligence and counterparty checks on New Zealand financial advisers, sharebrokers, insurance brokers, accountants, mortgage advisers and financial advice providers.

Data comes live from the New Zealand Companies Office (MBIE) public register at run time. Nothing is cached between runs.

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What you get that a name search does not

A companies-register lookup can tell you a name exists. The two fields that make this an FSPR check are:

1. The registered service categories. What this provider is actually registered to do — "Financial advice service (including financial advisers)", "Client money or property service", "Custodial service — retail service", "Employer or principal of a financial adviser" — each with its start date, and each labelled current or previous. A service a firm gave up in 2021 is not reported as one it offers today.

2. The dispute resolution scheme. Scheme name, membership number, effective date, address and website — FSCL, IFSO, FDRS or FSCL's equivalents. This is where a complaint about the provider goes, and confirming a provider has one is a statutory requirement for retail financial services in New Zealand.

For individual advisers the scheme reaches them through the financial advice provider they are engaged by, so this Actor reads the engagement chain too and reports the FAP by name and FSP number. Tools that read only the record-level field report "no dispute resolution scheme" for every natural person on the register.

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Input

{
  "names": [
    { "referenceId": "ADV-001", "name": "Adam Smith" },
    { "referenceId": "FIRM-002", "name": "Arrowsmith Financial Services" }
  ],
  "searchOperator": "Contains",
  "includeFinancialServices": true,
  "maxDetailedMatches": 10
}

names also accepts plain strings (["Adam Smith", "Acme Advisers Ltd"]), or objects with firstName + lastName, or organisationName. Any extra fields you include — such as referenceId — are echoed back on the result so it reconciles with your ATS, CRM or onboarding system.

Field	Default	What it does
names	required	People or firms to look up. Up to 200 per run.
searchOperator	Contains	Contains, StartsWith or Equals. Equals for an exact registered name; Contains for the widest recall.
includeFinancialServices	true	Open each match and read its service categories and dispute resolution scheme. Turn off for a fast name-and-status-only sweep.
maxDetailedMatches	10	How many matches per name to open. Matches beyond this are still returned with name, FSP number, status and dates.

On searching people: the register stores one name string per provider and matches against it, so a surname is the widest recall-safe query. If you supply firstName + lastName this Actor searches the surname — sending "First Last" would miss a record filed as "Last, First".

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Output

One dataset item per name, whether or not it matched.

{
  "referenceId": "ADV-001",
  "nameSearched": "Adam Smith",
  "verdict": "REGISTERED",
  "currentlyRegistered": true,
  "totalResults": 1,
  "matchCount": 1,
  "requiresManualVerification": true,
  "matches": [
    {
      "fspNumber": "FSP1004669",
      "name": "Adam SMITH",
      "providerType": "Individual",
      "tradingNames": ["My Mortgage"],
      "address": "316 Hooker Road, Rd 3, Hamilton, 3283, New Zealand",
      "registrationStatus": "Registered",
      "isCurrentlyRegistered": true,
      "registrationDate": "10-Jan-2023",
      "deregistrationDate": null,
      "annualConfirmationFilingMonth": "March, last filed on 16-Mar-2026",
      "currentServiceCount": 1,
      "financialServices": [
        {
          "section": "current",
          "service": "Financial advice service (including financial advisers)",
          "additionalInformation": "Financial adviser",
          "startDate": "10-Jan-2023",
          "endDate": null,
          "status": null,
          "licensingAuthority": null,
          "engagements": [
            {
              "provider": "MY MORTGAGE LIMITED (FSP768771) (NZBN: 9429033275208)",
              "engagementStartDate": "24-Apr-2023",
              "engagementEndDate": null,
              "disputeResolutionScheme": {
                "scheme": "Financial Services Complaints Limited (FSCL) – a Financial Ombudsman Service",
                "membershipNumber": "3949",
                "effectiveDate": "24-Apr-2023",
                "website": "https://fscl.org.nz/"
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "disputeResolutionSchemes": [ { "scheme": "…", "membershipNumber": "3949" } ]
    }
  ],
  "guidance": "…"
}

Verdicts

Verdict	Meaning
REGISTERED	At least one match is currently registered on the FSPR.
REGISTERED_HISTORICAL	Matches exist but all are deregistered. Check deregistrationDate.
NO_MATCH	No entry on the register under this name.
UNCHECKED	The name could not be read, or the register could not answer for it. Not the same as "not registered" — and never charged for.

UNCHECKED exists because the expensive failure for a screening tool is returning "nothing found" when the truth is "nothing was looked at". Those two answers are never conflated here, and you are never billed for the second one.

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What this check does and does not cover

It covers the FSPR: who is registered to provide financial services in New Zealand, which services, since when, under which dispute resolution scheme, and — where the register records it — which licence and which licensing authority.

It does not cover:

• Employees advising under an employer's registration. An individual can give financial advice under a registered financial advice provider without appearing on the FSPR themselves. If a person returns NO_MATCH, check the employing firm too. The guidance field says so on every no-match result.
• The full FMA licence position. The FSPR records a licence where one has been noted against a service (status, licensingAuthority), but the Financial Markets Authority's own register is authoritative on licensing.
• Identity. The FSPR holds no date of birth, so a name match is not proof that this is your person. Confirm against the FSP number. Every match sets requiresManualVerification: true.
• Other registers. Not the NZ Companies Register, not the Insolvency Register, not the disqualified-directors register, not the Personal Property Securities Register.

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Reliability

The register is a form-driven application with no public API, and its characteristic failure is a quiet one: post a step to the wrong place and it answers HTTP 200 with an empty page rather than an error. For a screening tool that is the worst possible failure, because an empty page looks exactly like good news.

So, before any of your names are touched, each run walks the whole search → open record → read services path against a known control record and checks it got back what it asked for. If that fails the run stops and you are charged nothing. Per name, a result is only reported once rows have actually been read; anything else is reported UNCHECKED and is not billed.

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Pricing

Event	Price	When
Screening run	$0.10	Once per run, after the register has passed its integrity check. A run that aborts on an unreachable or changed register costs you nothing.
Name checked	$0.35	Per name actually answered. Names that could not be read or could not be checked are free.

Platform usage costs are included — the prices above are what you pay.

For comparison, per-name New Zealand FSPR checks are sold by employment screening vendors at around AU$42 per name, delivered manually.

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Source and legal basis

Financial Service Providers Register, New Zealand Companies Office / Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. The register is public and searchable by anyone without an account; registration and the register's publication are required by the Financial Service Providers (Registration and Dispute Resolution) Act 2008, precisely so that these facts can be checked. This Actor reads only the public search interface, at human-scale request rates, and honours the site's robots.txt.