Authorisation

A permission attached to an entity and to a list of activities, not to a brand and not to a person. A firm permitted to execute orders is not thereby permitted to advise on them, to manage money on a client's behalf or to hold client assets, and each of those is a separate item on the permission. The entity holding it is named in the regulator's own public register together with its status, the activities allowed and any conditions imposed, which is why the register is read on the authority's site rather than through a link the firm controls.

Obligations travel with the permission and are continuous rather than one off. Capital has to be held against the firm's own risks, client money has to be handled under the applicable segregation rules, conflicts have to be identified, managed and disclosed, records have to be kept, complaints have to be handled inside defined time limits, and marketing has to be fair, clear and not misleading. Material changes have to be notified. The regulator can inspect, and business carried on outside what was granted is unauthorised business rather than a technicality.

Two misreadings are common enough to be worth naming. Authorisation is not an endorsement of a product or a forecast of an outcome, and it does not make a leveraged position safer: losses on such a position can exceed the amount deposited whatever permission the firm holds. And a registered trading name is not the licensed entity. A group can run several brands from one permission, so the name on a website is checked against the entity on the register rather than assumed to be it.