Checking the legal address and licenses of a financial company
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The first and most important stage in assessing a broker or investment project is checking (1) state registration and (2) licenses from financial regulators. These checks are carried out in turn.
Companies, as a rule, leave data on registration and regulation in the basement of the site. This can be a verbal fixation: in one line the legal address, in the second - identifiers of the permit document. This can also be a menu for going to the corresponding page with scanned copies and descriptions of documents and links to government agencies involved.
Registration and regulation data must be disclosed without fail. You cannot take managers' word for it that "everything is fine with the documents." Most often, these words do not correspond to reality. In 99% of cases, the legal address turns out to be fictitious or "borrowed", and the license is created in Photoshop or expired.
If a company fails the registration and regulation check, it is worth stopping its analysis and continuing the search for a reliable partner to increase funds.
Checking the registration (legal address) of the company
Registration is a procedure for legalizing the activities of an organization, which is required by law. If a company (any, not necessarily a financial one) operates without state registration, it does so illegally.
Each legal entity must have
1) its own separate name,
2) internal structure and management bodies,
3) legal address, and
4) accounting. Its own separate name must appear in the bank details of the organization. A potentially reliable company provides a set of data on its registration. In Russia, brokers and investment projects usually prefer the legal form of LLC. For example, Finam Forex, VTB Capital Forex and PSB Forex are all limited liability companies. In the USA, financial companies register an analogue of LLC - LLC or Inc., in the UK - LTD. For example, Interactive Brokers in the USA has the legal form of LLC, in Canada - Inc., in the UK - LTD. This broker has gone through registration procedures in many countries, to whose citizens it provides services.
Whatever the company reports about its registration on its website, the data should be questioned and verified. If you collect popular methods of deception at this level, you will get a solid list.
Fraudsters completely falsify reality: they name a name that does not exist in the register and choose a legal address at random.
Unreliable companies borrow data from other organizations, posing as them.
Owners of dishonest financial businesses indicate an inappropriate type of activity during registration (we are talking about OKVED) in order to avoid the licensing procedure.
Fraudsters position their offices as structural units of well-known holdings.
Unreliable companies are registered in the “black” offshore zones of Belize, Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands, where international business standards do not apply.
Checking the registration not only confirms the reality of the organization, it is also important for understanding the financial condition of the company. Many traders and investors are mistaken when they refuse to “get into someone else’s pocket”. However, open data on revenue and profit, as well as the fact of paying taxes, allow us to understand that the company operates within the legal framework and is controlled by the state.
How to check registration data? Depending on the region of registration, there are two ways. The first is suitable for checking Russian companies, and the second - foreign ones.
To check a Russian company, you need to go to the website of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. It belongs to the Federal Tax Service and is located at egrul.nalog.ru. On the resource, you need to specify the TIN, OGRN or name of the legal entity and click the "Find" button. If the company exists, the site will display up-to-date data. If it is fictitious, you should immediately return to the search for a reliable partner to increase funds.
But it is not enough to make sure that the company is real. Is this the right company? Download the extract generated by the Federal Tax Service from the resource egrul.nalog.ru. This is a useful document with information about registration and licenses, authorized capital, types of economic activity (OKVED), branches, taxes, etc. An extract from the Federal Tax Service helps to verify the existence of a company, the availability of licenses, and compliance with the specified types of activity.
To find out about the extension of licenses to a specific website address, you need to go to the regulator's resource and do the work there (and this will be discussed in the next section of this material).
And to check a foreign company, you can first contact any aggregator of international registers. One of these is located at info-clipper.com/en/ and is called InfoClipper. On this resource, you need to specify the country and company name, click the Search button and get the result. If the organization exists and is registered, InfoClipper will display the relevant data. You need to be careful, because the results may show similar names instead of the one you are looking for. If the resource shows a message with the text “No matching result”, you need to continue searching for a reliable service provider.
To get the maximum data about a foreign financial company, you should contact the state registry website. To avoid problems with understanding information in English, you can activate translation into Russian in your browser. You must continue to enter queries in English.
Let's say a company claims to be registered in the UK. To verify this, you need to enter the phrase “check company registration in great britain” in the Google or Yandex search bar. The search engine will display the corresponding government website with the identifying “gov” in the domain name in the first lines. There, you need to go to the Companies House registry search.
On the Companies House website, you need to enter the company name or its registration number in the search bar. On this British website, you can access the data catalog: an overview of the current status, type of activity, office address, and management names.
