How do I verify that an Australian financial adviser is currently licensed?

A lookup by name, ADV number, or AFSL number against the ASIC Financial Advisers Register returns current authorisation status directly. The register is public but checking it manually does not produce a structured record of what was found or when the check ran. Programmatic access returns a logged result with a retrieval timestamp for every call.

Why is rechecking adviser authorisation status important for dealer groups?

An adviser's authorisation can lapse, or a licensee can end a representative's authorisation, without the dealer group being immediately notified. A process that only checks status at onboarding is checking a moment in time and assuming it holds. Automated rechecks against the current register surface a status change without a manual review cycle.

How do Australian licensees confirm an authorised representative is still licensed before paying commissions?

A status check against the current ASIC FAR record confirms authorisation before a commission run, rather than relying on a status recorded at the time the adviser was first onboarded. The check itself is logged with a timestamp and a request ID, providing a documented record of each verification.

What data does the ASIC Financial Advisers Register API return?

Authorisation status as current, ceased, or suspended; the licence hierarchy showing which AFSL an adviser is authorised under and which entity controls it; qualifications; CPD failure years; memberships; and a lineage record with FAR dataset date and retrieval timestamp.

How to verify an Australian financial adviser before a client relationship

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ASIC KYC Financial Advisers AFS Licence Dealer Group

A dealer group takes on a new authorised representative. A platform onboards an adviser. A licensee wants to confirm someone still holds a current AFS authorisation before paying a referral commission. All three of these come down to the same question: is this person actually licensed right now, and has anything changed since the last time anyone checked.

The answer sits in ASIC's Financial Advisers Register, and it's public. The friction isn't access, it's that checking it properly means going to ASIC Connect, searching by name, and reading through the result by hand. Fine for one adviser. Slow and easy to skip for a dealer group managing hundreds of authorised representatives across multiple licensees.

The gap is the recheck, not the initial check

What gets missed when this is manual isn't usually the initial check. It's the recheck. An adviser's authorisation can lapse, or a licensee can end a representative's authorisation, and nobody necessarily notices until something else forces a look, an audit, a complaint, a renewal cycle. A process that only checks status once, at onboarding, is checking a moment in time and assuming it holds.

That recheck is now fully automated on this end.

Programmatic access to the ASIC FAR

Tech Compass provides programmatic access to the ASIC Financial Advisers Register, kept in sync with ASIC's own publication schedule, so a licensee or platform can check authorisation status as part of an actual workflow rather than a manual lookup, with the check itself logged rather than left to whoever remembered to run it.

AU Financial Advisers Register API

Requires a Professional plan subscription with the AU Financial Advisers add-on (AUD $400/month), or included in Professional+.

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