How this site works

Who built this

MSB Renew was built and is maintained by Dylan Merigaud. His LinkedIn profile is the way to reach him about anything on this site: a result that looks wrong, a filing that has gone stale, a paragraph that reads unclear. There is no company behind this site. It is one person's research, published under his own name.

Where the data comes from

The checker reads FinCEN's own public MSB Registrant Search, the same export anyone can download from that page's own Export to Excel button. No login, no API key. The copy this site currently reads from was downloaded 2026-08-24, holding 31,909distinct registrants after removing duplicate filings for the same registrant (FinCEN's export lists one row per filing, not one row per registrant, so a name that filed twice in the export window is collapsed to its single most recent filing here). FinCEN republishes this registry on its own schedule. A registration filed after the download date will not show here until the next refresh.

The parsing and dedup logic mirrors a pipeline already built and verified against the same registry (checked live 2026-08-24: HTTP 200, a 13-column tab-separated export plus a trailing legend block, explicitly excluded rather than silently dropped).

The exact rule

Every renewal date on this site follows from one federal regulation, 31 CFR 1022.380(b)(2)-(3), verified against the eCFR full text on 2026-08-24:

“The initial registration period is the two-calendar-year period beginning with the calendar year in which the money services business is first required to be registered. Each two-calendar-year period following the initial registration period is a renewal period.”

“The registration form for a renewal period must be filed on or before the last day of the calendar year preceding the renewal period.”

In plain terms: registration runs in two-calendar-year periods, and each renewal is due on or before December 31 of the year before the next period starts. For a filing received in year R, this works out to a renewal due December 31 of (R plus 2). FinCEN's own 2007 renewal notice worked this exact math: an MSB last renewed in 2005 was due again December 31, 2007.

The honest limit of this computation

FinCEN's bulk export carries no flag saying whether a given filing date was itself a RENEWAL or an INITIAL registration. The rule above applies to a renewal filing. A first-time registration's own first renewal is due one year earlier instead (the same regulation, read the other way). This site applies the renewal rule uniformly to every filing date, because most registrants in the export are long- running operations rather than brand-new registrants, and it says so here rather than hiding the assumption. If your registration was a first-time filing rather than a renewal, your true deadline may be one year earlier than what this site computes. When in doubt, the FinCEN Resource Center is the authoritative source for your own registration's status.

What is actually at stake

“Any person who fails to comply with any requirement of 31 U.S.C. 5330 or this section shall be liable for a civil penalty of $5,000 for each violation. Each day a violation of 31 U.S.C. 5330 or this section continues constitutes a separate violation.”

31 CFR 1022.380(e), 31 U.S.C. 5330(e)

That penalty is real, and it is written into federal statute. It is also worth being honest about how it plays out in practice: FinCEN's own published MSB enforcement matters rarely, if ever, sanction a bare renewal lapse standing alone, as opposed to a lapse discovered alongside a separate, more serious compliance failure. This site states the statutory exposure plainly and does not claim it gets enforced on its own more often than the public enforcement record shows.

Why this exists

“The MSB Registration calculator is no longer available. MSBs with questions regarding their renewal deadline should contact the FinCEN Resource Center.”

FinCEN, fincen.gov

FinCEN built a renewal calculator once and retired it. It does not proactively remind a registrant of its own deadline. This site is an attempt to fill exactly that gap, from the same public data FinCEN itself publishes.

What this is not

This site is independent research, not legal advice, and using it creates no advisor-client or attorney-client relationship of any kind. It reads a registrant's own public filing history against FinCEN's published renewal rule and reports a computed date. It does not review a firm's actual compliance status, does not account for facts outside the public export, and makes no promise about a registration's real status. Decisions about an MSB's renewal obligations should be made with qualified counsel, not from this site alone.