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1. A Brief introduction to FMA

The Financial Markets Authority (FMA), established in 2011 as an Independent Crown Entity, is the New Zealand government agency responsible for enforcing securities, financial reporting and company law as they apply to financial services and securities markets.

In 2014, it began working under a much wider mandate with the introduction of the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013 (FMC Act), with the vision to promote and facilitate the development of fair, efficient and transparent financial markets.

On the other hand, under the Financial Services Providers (Registration and Dispute Resolution) Act 2008, everyone who provides, or offers to provide, a financial service in New Zealand or from New Zealand to other countries must be registered on the Financial Service Providers Register (FSPR) as a Financial Service Providers(FSP), before they can legally provide financial services although there are some exceptions and exemptions.

2. Steps to Verify a FMA License

You can search the FSPR to identify FSPs and find out which services they're registered or licensed to provide, their business address, and what the status of their registration is.

Here are the guides:

Step 1

Go to the FMA’s FSPR website: https://fsp-register.companiesoffice.govt.nz/,and type in the name or registration number of the broker in the search bar.

Step 2

Click to search, and you will see the following page.When it doesn’t turn to this page, you may need to check the information you typed in.

If this page still doesn’t show up after confirmation, it can mean your broker didn’t register itself as a FSP, which means it is not qualified to provide financial services.

Step 3

Check FSP status as well as the name and business of the broker to see if it is regulated and is the same broker you are trading with.

Here is an example of registered broker:

Another example of deregistered broker:

Step 4

Next you need to verify if your broker is qualified to deal with retail Forex, by searching for the key word “Derivatives issuer” in the Financial service module.

This is the most important step, for not all FSP are licensed to operate retail Forex except for the one with derivatives issuer license.