One engagement, one contract
An ODP application draws on regulatory strategy, corporate governance, risk framework design, capital and financial modelling, compliance, technology and reporting readiness, and legal documentation.
Most applicants assume that means four or five separate appointments. It doesn't have to.
ODP Gateway connects you with a specialist practice that takes the whole thing under one engagement. You sign one contract — with that practice, not with us. They are accountable for the work, and for whether the application is submitted in a state the FSCA can approve.
What ODP Gateway does is the introduction. We know this market, we know who is capable of the work, and we make sure you are talking to a practice suited to your business model rather than the first one you find. Once you and the practice are engaged, the project is theirs.
Throughout this page, "the team" means that practice. We are the front door, not the practitioners.
Why not just hire the specialists yourself?
You can. Some firms do. Here is what you are taking on if you do.
You become the project manager on a project you have never run. Four or five advisers, each doing their piece well, none of them responsible for whether the pieces fit. You are the only person who sees all of it — and you have no benchmark for what a complete application looks like, because you have not seen one before.
The documents have to agree with each other. The risk framework has to reflect the book described in the business plan. The capital model has to match the projections in the financial pack. Form 2's business plan has to match what the operational narrative says you do. Independently drafted, these diverge — and the FSCA reads them as a single submission.
Sequencing decides your timeline. Key individual competence evidence, capital in the right entity, and trade repository capability all take longer than the documents do, and all of them have to start early. Firms that discover this in month four lose months they cannot recover.
You will not know what is weak until the FSCA tells you. By then it is a request for further information, and you are answering it under time pressure with advisers who have moved on to other work.
The question is not whether you could assemble the same people. It is whether you want to spend the next year finding out whether you assembled them correctly. The alternative is not four advisers instead of five — it is one practice that is already assembled.
What the engagement covers
What the team delivers under that single engagement:
Scope assessment — whether you need authorisation at all, and on what basis.
Readiness review — against Conduct Standard 1 of 2018: what exists, what does not, and what has to be built before an application is credible.
Build — capital model and three-year plan, governance framework, risk framework connected to your actual book, compliance function and monitoring plan, business continuity, trade reporting capability.
Key individuals — Form 1 for every controlling body member and senior manager, competence evidence, and the fit and proper pack under Annexures A, B and C.
Assembly and submission — the full application, in the FSCA's structure.
FSCA engagement — requests for further information, interpreted and answered.
Post-authorisation — operational readiness and ongoing obligations.
How long it takes
Preparation to submission: one to three months.
FSCA review to finalisation: six to ten months.
The second number is the one to plan around. Once the application is submitted, the timeline belongs to the FSCA — no adviser shortens it, and no fee accelerates it.
Which means the only part anyone controls is the first one to three months. Every week lost there is a week added to the far end.
What the team needs from you
The single largest variable in the preparation phase is not the team. It is how quickly the applicant returns documents, answers questions and makes decisions.
The team will need, at pace:
Financial records, projections and the assumptions behind them
Full disclosure from every controlling body member and senior manager, including five years of shareholding history
Decisions on structure, roles and reporting lines — several of which the board will need to take
Access to whoever actually knows how your systems, booking and valuation work
Honest answers about anything in the firm's or an individual's history that the FSCA will find
An applicant who turns work around in days completes preparation in one to two months. An applicant who takes weeks to respond will take three, or longer.
Better to set that expectation before you engage than explain it in month four.
What it costs
What determines the number is how much has to be built, not how many pages get written.
The variables that matter: whether you are a bank or non-bank applicant, the complexity of your book and group structure, how much of the governance and risk framework already exists, whether your key individuals can already evidence competence, and whether trade reporting capability is in place.
A firm with an existing compliance function, capital in the right entity and named key individuals who meet the standard is a different engagement from a startup with a business plan and a shareholder.
The team quotes after a scope call, in writing, with the scope fixed before work begins.
How ODP Gateway is paid
ODP Gateway is paid a fee based on the engagement by the specialist practice. You pay the practice for the work. You do not pay ODP Gateway separately, and the introduction does not increase what the engagement costs you.
The practice quotes on scope, after its own assessment. ODP Gateway has no part in setting it.
We say this openly because you should know it before you take the call. It also means there is no reason for us to introduce you to a practice that is wrong for your situation — an engagement that goes badly is worth nothing to us.
What a stalled application costs
A refused or stalled application is measured in unutilised capital, a launch date gone, and — where the firm has been trading in the meantime — a regulatory problem rather than a licensing one.
With six to ten months of FSCA review at the end of it, a resubmission is not a correction. It can be another year.
Talk to an ODP specialist
Tell us what your business does and where you are in the process. We'll come back to you on whether this looks like an ODP question, an FSP question, or one for a regulatory attorney — and introduce you accordingly.
There is no charge for the introduction.
ODP Gateway
FSCA ODP authorisation, run as a single project. We connect you with the specialist practice that prepares the application.