Making the FCA Register searchable

While the FCA Register is a rich data source, it remains fragmented, with the website only allowing users to check firms one at a time. There is no search function or classification of firms, leaving compliance and regtech professionals flying blind when trying to find firms needing regulatory or compliance support.

Hackford’s software platform enables compliance consultants and regtech sales teams to search all regulated financial services businesses by common-sense market segments, such as insurance, credit, investment, and advice, and by subsegments like investment managers, hedge funds, wealth managers, holistic financial planners, and insurance brokers.

Previously, compliance and regtech professionals had to check individual firms via the FCA Register, as it was simply impossible to search across the 70k+ companies and 220k+ active regulated individuals.

Scaling Mount FCA

To enable searching across companies by market segment, Hackford’s team has classified all businesses using a range of methods, including analysing regulatory permissions, SIC codes, annual accounts filed at Companies House, web data, human judgement, and machine learning techniques.

Labelling the companies required significant investment in both technology and human resources. The reason for this complexity is that regulatory permissions do not neatly map onto common-sense categories. For instance, a firm permitted to arrange deals in investments could be a corporate finance firm, an investment manager, or a wealth manager, among other possibilities.

Permissions alone are insufficient for classification; it requires understanding a company’s core business, which often involves triangulating between multiple sources of information. Additionally, for many traditional financial services providers, establishing a web presence has not been as essential as it is for most businesses. Therefore, identifying reliable information beyond websites was crucial for improving classification accuracy.

Now the FCA Register works for you

As a result of this classification project, the FCA Register data is now fully searchable on the Hackford software platform. Users can construct increasingly sophisticated searches of classified businesses, incorporating additional criteria such as specific Senior Management Functions held by individuals, any particular requirements or limitations, and fines imposed upon the business.

When the Hackford platform launched in June this year, our adviser and former FCA regulator, Nick Bayley, said:

“When I was in regulatory consulting, we’d have jumped at a tool like Hackford. Having seen the FCA Register from the inside, I know just how much untapped value it holds for consultants and compliance teams—if only you can unlock it. Hackford does exactly that. It turns a static public record into real intelligence, finally making the Register work for the people who find it most useful.”

Nick would know—he’s the former Head of UK Regulatory Consulting at Kroll and previously led key market policy initiatives at the FCA, including MiFID II and MAR. He now serves as the independent Non-Executive Chair of the International Stock Exchange Authority and is also an adviser to regtech firm Mettis.

Improving FCA search is just one part of our long-term vision but it is a core component in making data genuinely valuable for compliance consultants and regtech professionals, saving them significant time. Over time, we will evolve our classification system to fit the changing market and our customers' needs, but the hardest step is done.