Afsa » Authorisation FAQs

When you apply for authorisation, you need to provide complete and detailed information about your business – such as, its structure, key individuals and financial resources. In return, we offer you the commitments listed below. Our commitments are: We will tell you that we have received your application within 2 working days. We will also tell you which case officer we have assigned to your application. The assigned case officer will handle all communication about your application. We will send you our Initial Review Letter within 4 weeks. During this period, we will: - assess your business, considering whether it meets the minimum ‘threshold conditions’; - check your application against various databases and information held by other regulatory agencies. You will have up to 2 months to address all our comments and observations. During this period, we may also require having an interview with some candidates for Controlled and Designated Functions. When we receive an updated application package, we expect that all our outstanding comments are cleared. However, experience shows, that this is not always the case. Therefore, we will send you our second review comments within 2 weeks. The faster and better you address our comments, the faster we will make a decision on your application. In rare cases it happens that the third draft application still does not satisfy our requirements. We will then have to charge a Supplementary Fee for incurring additional costs in dealing with the application. We will notify you as soon as reasonably practicable that a supplementary fee is to be required, for you to make an informed decision as to whether keep or withdraw an application. If you decide to continue the authorisation process, we will send you our third review comments within 2 weeks. The designated case officer will give you an update on the current status of your case at least monthly and often more frequently. You will be notified within a week once your application is considered complete, at which point you will also be given an indication as to when your application is likely to be decided. These commitments will apply until we approve your application or tell you of our decision that it should be refused, in which case you will have an opportunity to withdraw an application, otherwise we will apply a formal refusal process. Please note that failure to provide requested information may lead to delays in assessing your application. Thus, we endeavour to process all licence applications promptly, however, the process times depend on the complexity of the applicant’s proposed operations and the quality of the application itself. In general, average application processing time, from the time the AFSA receives a materially complete application, is around two to three months.