The number that matters is the deal price for the existing entity (paid to the vendor), not the licence’s statutory cost. That price depends on the licence class held, the age of the entity, the quality of banking, the size of any retained client book, and whether MLRO and key staff are transferring. Cadena does not publish indicative prices because every Vanuatu broker has a different operational footprint; we share comparable transaction context once we hold your acquisition brief. The statutory paid-up capital sits at USD 50,000 for Classes A–C and USD 500,000 for Class D, plus the one-off VFSC bond. Those numbers travel with the entity at closing.

Yes, and arguably more so. The Financial Dealers Licensing (Amendment) Act No. 5 of 2024 made the licence permanent (rather than annually renewable), restructured it into four classes, and gave the VFSC clearer on-site inspection authority. The regulator has used those tools to revoke licences for non-compliance, which has pulled the median quality of the book upward. Acquirers should still expect bank counterparties to apply enhanced due diligence to Vanuatu structures, because the offshore status is a feature on the tax side and a friction on the banking side.

Vanuatu offers a wider permitted-activity matrix at a lower paid-up capital threshold than most peer jurisdictions. Seychelles operates a Securities Dealer Licence under the FSA with broadly similar scope but a higher minimum capital. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines no longer issues a forex-specific licence at all, which has redirected demand. Mauritius (FSC) and Belize (FSC) sit at a higher cost base. The trade-off acquirers weigh is brand familiarity (Mauritius is better known to tier-1 banking) against capital efficiency and product breadth (Vanuatu wins). See our Seychelles, Mauritius and SVG pages for the same buy-side analysis on those routes.

The VFSC must approve any acquisition of voting control before closing. The acquirer files a change-of-control package: corporate documents on the buyer, fit-and-proper questionnaires on the ultimate beneficial owners and proposed directors, source-of-funds evidence, an updated AML programme, and a transition plan for key positions (notably the Vanuatu-resident MLRO). Cadena’s brokers coordinate that filing in parallel with the share-purchase mechanics. The regulator’s response timing has been workable on clean files. We will not represent a transaction where the buyer’s file is not credibly clean.

Sometimes, and that is the question that decides whether a Vanuatu deal is operationally worth it. Correspondent-banking relationships for VFSC-licensed brokers are concentrated in a small set of providers, and each runs its own UBO-change protocol. We pre-screen banking continuity before an entity enters our book, and we run a confidential courtesy notification to the bank during early-stage talks so the acquirer is not surprised at the closing table. Entities where the operating bank has signalled it will close on UBO change are flagged in our intake and not marketed as “banking-included”.

Acquisition is materially faster, with one caveat. A fresh VFSC application runs roughly three to six months, banking onboarding is a separate sequential cycle, and the acquirer carries the full upfront capital and bond from day one. Buying an existing entity collapses the licensing and banking timelines into one parallel workstream that runs against the change-of-control approval. The caveat: the vendor’s bank, prior client KYC, and any latent supervisory exchanges become the acquirer’s problem after closing. That is precisely what Cadena’s pre-vetting is for.