Anjouan Licence Requirements and Application Process: Documents, Stages and the Timeline Nobody Publishes

Why requirements and process are one page

Google treats them as one question. The queries for requirements and for how to get the licence return the same three results at the top, and the process queries pair just as tightly with documents and with how long it takes. Splitting them would have produced two of our pages competing for one result set, so they live together.

What the Authority actually asks for

The published list is shorter than most guides suggest, and worth reading for what it does not say as much as for what it does.

Corporate documents. Certificates of incorporation, articles of association, current shareholder registers, and for a corporate group the full ownership chain through to the ultimate beneficial owner. The Authority asks for certified copies of corporate formation documents.

People. For directors, shareholders and beneficial owners: government-issued identification, proof of address, personal declarations, and professional history and references if requested.

Money. Audited financial statements, bank references and source-of-funds evidence. The standard is that the applicant demonstrates adequate financial standing to support the proposed licensed operations. Note the shape of that test: it is a judgement about your operation rather than a capital threshold, and there is no published minimum capital to meet.

Everything has to be complete, accurate and current at the time of submission.

What the Authority does not say, and other guides fill in anyway

Three gaps are worth naming, because you will see all three answered confidently elsewhere.

There is no published requirement for notarisation or apostille. Certified copies are asked for on corporate formation documents. Anything stricter that you are told is required may well be your provider’s practice, or another jurisdiction’s rule carried across, and it is worth asking which.

There is no published validity period for documents. The requirement is that they are current at submission. A rule that a bank reference must be under three months old is a sensible professional standard and not a published one.

And technical documentation is not itemised on the required-documents page. Given that licence conditions turn on approved operational domains, expect the domains to be part of the filing, but we are not going to invent a technical annex the Authority has not published.

The four stages

The process is published as four steps, and they are less elaborate than the five-stage or seven-stage flows you will find in commercial guides.

Submission. The forms and supporting documentation, with all mandatory documents from the required list.

Review of the applicant information. The Authority examines what you filed for completeness and accuracy, and may contact you for clarification or more information.

Regulatory due diligence. This is the substantive stage. It covers corporate structure review, key-person evaluation, verification of the source of funds, and sanctions screening.

Issuance. The licence is granted subject to defined conditions and recorded in the public register, which is the point at which anyone can verify it. Our verification guide covers what that entry shows.

The Authority can request further documentation at any stage where it needs more to assess the application, so the stages are not strictly sequential in practice.

The timeline question, answered honestly

There is no published processing time. None.

What the Authority says is that processing times depend on the completeness of the submitted documentation and the complexity of the due-diligence review, and that applicants should submit complete, accurate documentation to avoid delays. That is the whole of it.

Every figure you have seen for Anjouan, including the one to two months this site quoted until September 2026, is adviser observation. It may well be accurate, and the jurisdiction does have a genuine reputation for speed. But it is not a commitment, there is nothing to appeal to if it slips, and a page that presents it as a statutory period is telling you something the Authority has not said.

Plan on the work being done when your file is complete, because the one lever the Authority names is the completeness of your own submission.

What actually causes delay

The Authority gives one warning directly: incomplete submissions may result in processing delays or refusal of the application. Refusal, not just delay, and the issuance fee is non-refundable regardless of outcome, so an incomplete file is an expensive way to learn this.

Beyond that, the due-diligence stage is where complexity turns into time. A layered ownership chain takes longer to trace to its ultimate beneficial owner. Key persons with histories in multiple jurisdictions take longer to evaluate. Source-of-funds evidence that arrives as a narrative rather than as documents invites a second request.

Before you file

Assemble the ownership chain to the ultimate beneficial owner first, because it is the part most likely to be incomplete and the part the due-diligence stage is built around. Get corporate formation documents certified. Decide the licence category before filing rather than after, since B2C and B2B are separate and the fee is charged per category; our category guide sets out the test. List every domain you intend to operate, because only approved domains may carry licensed activity and each additional B2C domain carries a fee. And budget the published fees knowing the issuance fee does not come back if the answer is no.