FSCA INTRODUCES NEW METHOD TO MAKE CHANGES TO THE REPRESENTATIVE REGISTER

 

The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) has amended the process by which authorised Financial Service Providers (FSP) submit changes to the representative register to the FSCA. These amendments can be found in the recently published FSCA Communication 19 of 2021.In terms of s13 of the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act (FAIS) FSPs must notify the FSCA of any changes to their representative register within 15 days of any changes to the data included in that register.

Currently, the FSP can inform the FSCA of changes through:

1. submitting Form FSP 5 to the Licensing and Business Centre of the FSCA to perform a profile change;
2. logging on to the FSCA e-portal using the log-in credentials provided by the FSCA; or
3. updating the representative register electronically either in text format or in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which is confirmed by the FSCA before being entered into the FSCA’s central record.

A new process of submitting profile changes came into effect on the 1st of November 2021 replacing method 3 mentioned above which will become obsolete from the 31st of March 2022.

An FSP will now be able to upload its representative register in XML (plain text) format using system to system integration using the FSCA web service.

FSPs will be able to join their systems to the FSCA web service using the SOAP API (simple object access protocol application programming interface) of the FSCA. This SOAP API will be used to submit changes to the representatives register.

With the commencement of Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) and the increase in data breaches in South Africa particularly cyber breaches it’s reassuring to know that this new method of capturing and submitting information places a high value on data security. All API Communication will be done over a secure protocol and data should be encrypted or decoded where specified. FSP’s will also be assigned a username and password which will need to be submitted with all updates to the representative register.

The FSP’s login credentials will be provided to the FSP via the FSCA e-portal and any unauthorised attempt to access the FCSA API will trigger an error alert stating that the credentials are invalid or that the FSP does not have access to the requested method. It is the FSP’s obligation to always maintain these credentials safely and securely.

A testing environment has been created by the FSCA to allow development and testing to be completed on the systems of the FSP in order to facilitate system integration and the use of the web service. Before an FSP can submit a representative change via the FSCA web service, the FSP must first be granted access to the testing environment.

To gain access, an FSP must send an email to repregister@fsca.co.za requesting a username and password, which will only be used for testing purposes. After, successful integration testing, new login credentials that will allow the FSP to submit changes to the representative register via the FSCA web service will be given to the FSP.