@pipeworx/brokercheck

Look up whether a stockbroker, investment-adviser rep, or brokerage firm has a clean regulatory record, via FINRA BrokerCheck — the public professional-conduct registry FINRA itself publishes for investor due diligence.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.

Tools

• brokercheck_search_individual(query, limit?) — search individuals by name; returns CRD, scope, has_disclosures flag, current employer(s).
• brokercheck_individual_detail(crd) — full profile by CRD, including the actual disclosure EVENTS (type, date, resolution, detail) when present — not just the flag.
• brokercheck_search_firm(query, limit?) — search brokerage firms by name; returns CRD, SEC number, scope, has_disclosures flag, branch count.

Per-name lookup only, by design. No bulk-enumeration tool is offered — see the Terms-of-Use finding below.

Auth

Keyless. api.brokercheck.finra.org is the same public API BrokerCheck's own search box calls; no registration or key required.

Terms of Use finding (read before touching this pack)

Quoted from https://brokercheck.finra.org/terms (BrokerCheck Terms of Use) and its plain-language summary at https://www.finra.org/investors/learn-to-invest/choosing-investment-professional/about-brokercheck/permitted-uses, both confirmed live 2026-09-13:

Users agree to comply with BrokerCheck's Terms of Use, which permit use of BrokerCheck data for investor protection, academic, compliance or regulatory purposes. The Terms of Use do not permit use of BrokerCheck for other purposes (with limited exceptions)... You can use BrokerCheck for personal and professional use to find an investment professional; review the background of your current investment professional; assist in judicial or arbitral proceedings; comply with securities or financial services laws, rules and regulations; or for similar uses consistent with promotion of just and equitable principles of trade and protection of investors and public interest.

If your use is for investor protection, academic, compliance or regulatory purposes, you may copy and compile BrokerCheck data, including by using data mining or similar tools, provided that such tools do not interfere with the proper working of BrokerCheck.

Redistribution requirements (apply when BrokerCheck data is passed to a third party): identify BrokerCheck as the source; provide links to BrokerCheck and its Terms of Use; notify the recipient their use is subject to the Terms of Use; maintain a correction process; disclose when the data was compiled; keep the data current. Key prohibitions: do not alter/modify the factual content of BrokerCheck data; do not use BrokerCheck data for unsolicited marketing of goods or services.

How this pack complies:

• Purpose fits the permitted-use categories. Every tool answers "find/review the background of an investment professional or firm" — exactly the personal/professional due-diligence use the Terms of Use name — and every tool description says so.
• No caching, no storage, no bulk redistribution. Every call is a live, per-request pass-through to api.brokercheck.finra.org — nothing is copied, compiled, or republished as a static or bulk dataset. This is closer to a real-time embedded search than the "copy and compile" / data-mining use the redistribution clause is written for, but every response still carries the attribution block below out of caution.
• Attribution block on every response: source: "FINRA BrokerCheck", source_profile_url (a live link to the individual's/firm's BrokerCheck profile page), terms_of_use (link to the Terms of Use), and compiled_at (an ISO timestamp — this data was compiled now, at call time, since it is a live pass-through and never stale).
  • terms_of_use_notice: callers relaying this data to an end user should notify them their use is subject to the BrokerCheck Terms of Use above.
• No alteration of factual content. Field values are passed through as-returned (renamed/restructured for consistency with our other packs, never reworded or reinterpreted).
• No marketing use. Nothing in this pack's design or description encourages using BrokerCheck data for unsolicited marketing.
• Per-name lookup only — no bulk enumeration tool. There is no "list all brokers" or "enumerate CRDs" tool. limit on the two search tools caps a single name-query's results at 50, mirroring what BrokerCheck's own UI returns; it does not enable crawling the registry.
• Rate/load: no query-string flags weaken FINRA's own defaults; the pack makes exactly one upstream request per tool call it services, so caller request volume already tracks Pipeworx's own per-account rate limits rather than adding an independent crawl surface.

Conclusion: ships. The serving shape (live per-name lookup, sourced, timestamped, unaltered, non-bulk) sits inside the permitted-use language above. This is not a categorical clearance for every possible use of this pack — a caller who tried to enumerate the whole registry through repeated per-name calls would be outside these terms regardless of what this README says, which is exactly why no bulk tool exists.

Data sources

• https://api.brokercheck.finra.org/search/individual — individual search (ind_* fields; disclosure flag is ind_bc_disclosure_fl).
• https://api.brokercheck.finra.org/search/individual/{crd} — individual detail; response wraps everything in a JSON string under content (parse it) containing basicInformation, currentEmployments, previousEmployments, and disclosures (each disclosure has eventDate, disclosureType, disclosureResolution, disclosureDetail).
• https://api.brokercheck.finra.org/search/firm — firm search (firm_* fields; disclosure flag is firm_disclosure_fl).
• Public profile pages for citation: https://brokercheck.finra.org/individual/summary/<crd>, https://brokercheck.finra.org/firm/summary/<crd>.

Gotcha: this is a separate API and a separate licence from the existing finra pack (short-sale/equity market data, its own strict FINRA licence terms) — do not fold the two together, and do not assume finra's licence terms apply here or vice versa.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brokercheck": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/brokercheck/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/brokercheck/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/brokercheck_search_individual \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"John Smith"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/brokercheck_search_individual. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brokercheck": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-brokercheck"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-brokercheck

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Brokercheck data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT