2026-07-06
The ASIC banned and disqualified persons register: what it is, and how to check it programmatically
ASIC maintains registers of people and organisations banned or disqualified from providing financial services, credit, or managing companies. If you are onboarding a business, a director, or a financial adviser, you probably need to check these registers. Here is what they are, and how to check them programmatically.
What the registers are
ASIC keeps two related registers. The banned and disqualified persons register covers individuals disqualified from managing corporations, or banned from providing financial services or credit. The banned organisations register covers companies and other bodies banned from financial services or credit in their own right.
People end up on these registers after ASIC enforcement action: a director disqualified for repeated company failures, an adviser banned for misconduct, a credit provider banned from the industry. That makes the registers a direct signal for onboarding and due diligence, particularly under Tranche 2 AML/CTF obligations, where screening against watchlists before providing a service is now a requirement rather than best practice.
The free source, and its friction
The data is published free on data.gov.au as a weekly CSV or XLSX file. Checking it yourself means downloading the file, parsing it (ASIC exports are often tab-delimited despite the .csv extension), matching names, and re-downloading each week as the file updates. Name matching is the hard part: names vary in spelling, formatting, and order, so a naive exact-match check will miss real hits and a naive substring match will drown you in false ones. The dataset's resource ID also rotates on re-upload, so a hardcoded download link quietly breaks or goes stale.
How to check it via API
AUO screens a name against the banned and disqualified persons register, the banned organisations register, and the DFAT sanctions consolidated list in a single call.
curl https://api.auo.com.au/v1/screen \
-H "Authorization: Bearer auo_sk_test_your_key" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name": "Jane Citizen"}'The response returns a status for each underlying register: review if
the name matches something on that register, or no_match if it does not,
each with an as_of date showing when that register was last checked.
{
"asic_banned_person": { "status": "no_match", "as_of": "2026-07-01" },
"asic_banned_org": { "status": "no_match", "as_of": "2026-07-01" },
"dfat_sanctions": { "status": "review", "as_of": "2026-07-05" },
"disclaimer": "no match found as of the date shown is not a clearance"
}Be clear about what this means. A review result is a possible match,
never a confirmed one, and it always names the register that produced the hit so you
know exactly what to check by hand. A no_match result is not a clearance:
it means no hit was found as of that date, not that the person is cleared for all time.
Any hit, on any register, warrants human review before you act on it.
Ongoing checks
A single screen only tells you the state on the day you checked. People and organisations get added to these registers continuously, so a clean result today can change tomorrow. You can watch an entity so a newly added banned-register entry, or a new sanctions listing, triggers a webhook instead of you re-checking on a schedule. See monitoring an Australian business for changes for how ongoing watch works.
Try it free
Screening runs on the same sandbox as the rest of the API, so you can build and test your onboarding flow at no cost before switching to live data. Read more about sanctions and watchlist screening, or get started below.