Who should hold your regulator fee? You
A regulator's fee is set and published by the regulator. Why it should go from you to the regulator directly, and what to ask about any bundled price.
Every regulator charges for assessing an application. The fee is set by the regulator, published by the regulator, and paid to the regulator. It is not a secret, and it is not negotiable.
That makes it one of the cleanest tests you can apply to anyone offering to help with your registration. Ask what happens to the regulator’s fee. The answer tells you how the rest of the arrangement is likely to work.
This post is about who should hold that money (you, until you pay the regulator), the questions to ask, and what a clean arrangement looks like. It contains no fee figures. Those depend on your regulator and your route, and they come with your route in the Route Finder.
Why the regulator fee is different
There are two kinds of cost in an application, and they behave differently.
The regulator’s fee pays for the regulator’s own work: checking your file, assessing your training, deciding. The regulator sets it and can change it. It is the same for every applicant on the same route, whoever helps them.
Any adviser’s fee pays for the help: reading your documents, building the file, drafting replies. It is set by the adviser and should be described by the adviser.
When the two are kept apart, you can see each one clearly. When they are folded into one figure, you cannot tell what the regulator is paid, what the adviser is paid, or whether part of the regulator’s fee has quietly become part of the adviser’s.
Questions to ask about the money
Will I pay the regulator directly?
The cleanest answer is yes: you pay the regulator from your own account, in your own name, and the receipt comes to you.
Can you show me where the regulator publishes its fee?
Anyone who works with your regulator should be able to point you to the page where it states what it charges. Read it yourself. Fees change, and the regulator’s own page is the only one that counts.
More questions worth asking
What does your own fee cover?
Ask for it stage by stage: what is included at the fit check, during the build, at filing and through queries. If a regulator asks for more information, is drafting the reply included?
Is any part of the regulator’s fee passed through you?
If yes, ask why. Ask for the regulator’s receipt in your name. Ask what happens to the money if the regulator’s fee changes, or if you stop before filing.
What happens if the route turns out not to be open?
A fit check can find that your training does not meet the standard as it stands. Ask what you will have paid by that point, and to whom.
Warning signs
- One package price, no breakdown. Ask for the regulator’s fee to be shown on its own line, with its source.
- The regulator’s fee paid into a personal account. A regulator takes payment through its own channels.
- A receipt that is not from the regulator. Ask for the regulator’s own receipt, in your name.
- A “regulator fee” that differs from the regulator’s page. Ask why, and believe the regulator.
- Reluctance to separate the two. A clean arrangement costs nothing to explain.
These are signals to ask more, not proof that something is wrong. Most of them can be answered in a sentence. Notice which ones cannot.
What a clean arrangement looks like
In a clean arrangement there are two payments that never touch. You pay the regulator through the regulator’s own process, when the application is ready to submit, and the receipt is yours. You pay the adviser for the adviser’s work, on terms you were given in writing before you started.
You can check the first against the regulator’s own page at any time. You can judge the second on what it covers. Nobody earns anything from the gap between them, because there is no gap.
How fees work with us
Regulator fees are paid by you, directly to the regulator. We never take a cut of one and we never mark one up. You submit your application in your own regulator account, and you pay the regulator from there.
Our fee is for preparing and assembling the application. We charge for work, not for access. Before any of that, the Route Finder will email you the regulator’s fee for your route, its published assessment timeline and the checklist, at no charge.
Once your file is open, the Credentis Global portal shows you every stage: fit check, documents, filed, queries and decision. At the filed stage it says plainly what is yours to do, which is the submission and the regulator’s payment, both from your own account, and what is ours, which is the preparation of each page. Your documents, our message thread and the stage your file is at all sit in that one place.
Before any money moves
- Find your regulator’s published fee on the regulator’s own page
- Pay the regulator directly, and keep the receipt in your name
- Ask for any adviser’s fee in writing, stage by stage
- Find out where your money stands if the fit check closes the route
- Keep the two payments apart, always
To get your route’s regulator fee and checklist by email, choose your profession and country in the Route Finder below.
What we do
How Credentis Global helps
You trained. We file. The regulator decides. Here is what that means for your file.
Your fit, read before anything is filed
we read your degree, transcripts and experience against the regulator’s published standard first, so you know where the file is strong and where it needs evidence.
Every document, in the order the regulator reads it
Each item is checked against the regulator’s own list: names matched to your passport, hours in writing, copies certified by the person the list names.
One portal, and a person who answers
Upload your documents, see every stage of the file and message us in one place. The person who replies is the specialist preparing your file.
We prepare and file. The regulator decides.
Your application goes in from your own regulator account with every page prepared, and every query is drafted against the regulator’s exact question.
One specialist owns your file
The specialist who reads your documents builds the file and answers the regulator’s queries. You always know who has it, and you pay the regulator directly.
