How to Check a Nepali Cooperative or Finance Company Before You Deposit: Registration, Licence and Regulator Verification (2026)

This is a procedure, not a recommendation. Nothing below says any cooperative or finance company is safe, and nothing says one is unsafe. The deliverable is a set of checks you can run yourself in half an hour, before any money moves.

Start with the certificate, not the signboard

Anyone taking deposits in Nepal sits on one side of a line. Either the institution is a cooperative registered under the Cooperative Act, 2074 (2017), or it is licensed by Nepal Rastra Bank under the Bank and Financial Institutions Act, 2073 (2016), usually shortened to BAFIA. That line decides which register proves the institution exists, whose rules it follows, and who you go to when something is wrong.

So the first document to ask for is the registration certificate, the one most people call the sahakari darta praman patra. Four things on it are worth writing down before anything else: the exact registered name, the registration number, the registration date, and the office that issued it. Take a photo if you are allowed to. A flat refusal to show any certificate at all is itself information.

Cooperatives: check the certificate against the register

The certificate names the office that registered the institution. That office is your authority for confirming status, and the register kept by the Department of Cooperatives is what you compare it against. This article does not settle which tier of office registers which kind of cooperative, and it does not need to: the certificate tells you where to go, so use what is printed on it rather than a rule of thumb.

Then compare names letter by letter. Savings-and-credit groups often operate under names sitting one word away from each other, and an identical name in a different district is not the same institution. If a staff member tells you the cooperative is "registered with the government", ask for the number and the office, then verify both.

Finance companies and other NRB-licensed institutions

NRB groups the institutions it licenses by class letter. Class A is commercial banks, Class B is development banks, Class C (finance companies) and Class D is microfinance financial institutions. If someone tells you they run a finance company, that is a specific claim: it means Class C, and Class C names appear on NRB's published list of licensed institutions. Link slot 1 goes to our page on the NRB licensed institutions list; slot 2 to our Class C finance company page.

Search that list for the exact name. A match, with the right class letter, answers the licensing question. No match under the class the institution claims is an answer too, and a far more useful one than any brochure.

Company registration is a separate matter. An entity can be registered at the Office of the Company Registrar and still hold no licence to take deposits. Our page on company registration at the Office of the Company Registrar explains how those records work (link slot 3). Being a registered company and being licensed to accept public deposits are two different things, and only one of them is checked by the certificate you were handed.

Does the deposit guarantee cover cooperatives? Read the scheme, don't guess

This is where most online answers go wrong, so no number appears here. The Deposit and Credit Guarantee Fund publishes its own current scheme, and that document decides the operative terms: which institutions are covered, and on what basis. Read it on the Fund's own site, on the day you are checking, and compare it against the institution in front of you.

Two rules for that reading. A scheme described in an old news story or reposted in a Facebook group is not the current scheme. And if you cannot open the current published scheme, leave the question open rather than accepting an answer from a counter. Unanswered beats wrongly answered.

Ask for these, and record what you are refused

You can request a copy of the registration certificate, the registered name and number in writing, the name of the auditor, and recent general assembly minutes. A cooperative is not obliged to hand over everything a member asks for, so the exercise is as much about the pattern of answers as the paperwork. Write down the date, who you spoke to, and what you were told no to.

If the details don't line up

You have two channels. The first is the office named on the certificate as registrar, or NRB if the institution is NRB-licensed. The second is NRB's own published complaint route for the institutions it licenses; get the current form and address from the central bank's site rather than a forwarded phone number. Keep your own copies of everything you send.

What this method can't do

It confirms registration and licence status. It does not measure solvency, management quality, or whether you will get your money back. Concern over savings-and-credit cooperatives returning member deposits entered wide public discussion in 2023-2024, and that is a fair reason to check carefully. But checking is not a guarantee. If a promised return is the main thing pulling you in, that is the moment to slow down, not the moment to skip the register.