FCA Register Search: What You Can and Cannot Find

The FCA Register is the first place to check whether a UK financial services firm or person is authorised, regulated or listed by the Financial Conduct Authority.

It is useful, official and free to search.

But it is also easy to misunderstand. The FCA Register is not a complete commercial database of the UK financial services market. It will help you check regulatory status. It will not tell you everything you might want to know about a firm, a person, a market segment or a sales opportunity.

This guide explains what you can find through FCA Register search, what you cannot find, and when you may need an enriched FCA database instead.

What is the FCA Register search?

The FCA Financial Services Register is the FCA's public record of firms, individuals and other bodies that are, or have been, authorised by the FCA or PRA.

People use it to check whether a firm is authorised, whether an individual appears in a regulated role, or whether a business has permission to carry out certain financial services activities.

For consumers, that usually means checking legitimacy before taking advice, investing money or using a financial service.

For businesses, it often means checking firms and people as part of compliance, due diligence, sales targeting, market mapping or M&A research.

The important thing to understand is that the FCA Register is a regulatory record. It is not designed as a lead generation tool, CRM database or market intelligence platform.

What you can find on the FCA Register

The FCA Register can help you find information about regulated firms, individuals and relationships between firms.

Depending on the record, you may be able to find:

• Authorised firms

• Previously authorised firms

• Firm Reference Numbers, often called FRNs

• Firm status

• Permissions and regulated activities

• Appointed representatives

• Principal firms

• Directory Persons

• Some individuals involved in regulated activities

• Unauthorised firms

• Clone firm warnings

• Contact details supplied by firms

This makes it a strong source for answering basic regulatory questions.

Is this firm authorised? What is its FRN? What activities does it have permission for? Is it an appointed representative? Who is its principal firm? Does a person appear in the Directory?

Those are exactly the kinds of questions the Register is built to answer.

How to search for an FCA-regulated firm

If you want to check a firm, you can search the FCA Register using details such as the firm name, trading name or FRN.

A firm record may show whether the firm is authorised, no longer authorised, registered, or otherwise listed. It may also show the firm's permissions, regulated activities and any appointed representative relationships.

This is useful when you already know which firm you are checking.

For example, you might search the Register because:

• You are onboarding a supplier or partner

• You are checking a financial adviser

• You are validating a prospect before outreach

• You are reviewing a regulated firm for due diligence

• You are checking whether a firm's permissions match what it claims to do

The Register is good for this kind of one-off lookup.

It is less good when your question is broader, such as "show me every FCA-regulated firm that matches this buyer profile."

How to search for individuals on the FCA Register

The FCA Register can also include people connected to regulated activity.

That may include approved individuals, Directory Persons, certified or assessed persons, and people connected to specific firms or roles.

A person record may help you understand:

• Which firm the person is connected to

• What role they hold

• Whether they appear as a Directory Person

• Their current regulated activities

• In some cases, previous roles or firm associations

This is useful for checking whether someone is connected to a regulated firm, or whether they appear in a relevant FCA-listed role.

It is also useful for business research. People data helps you understand who sits behind a regulated firm, how a business is structured, and whether the firm has the people profile you are looking for.

But again, the public Register is mainly a lookup tool. It does not behave like a modern people database.

What are Directory Persons?

Directory Persons are individuals whose information is published on the FCA Register under the Directory of certified and assessed persons.

This can include people who perform certain roles at FCA-regulated firms, including customer-facing or regulated activities.

Directory Persons data can help you understand who is active within a firm and what type of role they perform.

That matters because firm-level data only tells part of the story.

A firm may have permission to carry out a regulated activity, but the people connected to that firm often reveal much more about its actual operating model.

For example, a sales team may want to identify firms with certain adviser profiles. A compliance team may want to check current roles. An M&A researcher may want to understand the depth of a firm's regulated team.

The public Register can help, but extracting that insight across thousands of firms is hard without a structured database.

What are Appointed Representatives?

Some firms on the FCA Register are listed as appointed representatives, often shortened to ARs.

An appointed representative carries out regulated activity on behalf of another firm, known as the principal. The principal agrees what activities the AR can carry out and is responsible for that business.

This relationship matters.

If you are checking a firm for compliance, you need to know whether it is directly authorised or operating as an appointed representative.

If you are doing market research, the principal and AR relationship can help you map networks, distribution structures and group relationships.

If you are doing sales or M&A research, appointed representative data can help you understand how firms are connected and where responsibility sits.

The Register can show these relationships, but it does not automatically turn them into a clean market map.

What the FCA Register does not show

The FCA Register is authoritative, but it is not complete in the way a commercial researcher might expect.

It generally will not tell you:

• A firm's revenue

• A firm's assets under management

• A firm's growth rate

• A firm's client type or target market

• A firm's sales potential

• A firm's technology stack

• A complete commercial profile

• A clean prospecting list

• A buyer persona segment

• Whether a firm is likely to buy your product

• Whether a firm is likely to sell or raise capital

• Whether a firm is increasing headcount

• Whether a firm is changing strategy

• Which similar firms you should also target

It also does not automatically connect FCA records with Companies House, firm websites, market signals, CRM data or external datasets.

That is the core gap.

The FCA Register tells you what is officially recorded. It does not tell you what is commercially useful. That's where you might need Distos.

Why FCA Register searches can be confusing

FCA Register search can also be confusing because financial services firms are messy in the real world.

You may run into issues such as:

• Firms using trading names

• Firms changing names over time

• Similar-sounding company names

• Firms that are no longer authorised

• Firms operating as appointed representatives

• Clone firms pretending to be genuine authorised firms

• People moving between firms

• Groups with multiple regulated entities

• Records that do not match the language used on a firm's website

This does not mean the Register is wrong. It means regulatory data reflects legal and regulatory structures, not always the way firms describe themselves commercially.

A firm's brand, Companies House entity, FCA record and website may not line up neatly.

That is exactly why enriched data matters.

FCA Register search vs FCA Firm Checker

You may also come across the FCA Firm Checker.

The FCA Firm Checker is aimed mainly at consumers who want to check whether a firm is authorised and avoid scams.

The FCA Register is the broader public record used to inspect firms, individuals, permissions and regulatory relationships.

There is overlap between the two, but the basic point is the same: both are designed to help you check authorisation and legitimacy.

They are not designed to help a sales team build a segmented target list, or a private equity firm identify acquisition targets.

Can you use FCA Register search to build a firm list?

Not really. If you need to look up ten firms manually, the public Register may be enough. You can look them up one by one and manually add the details to a spreadsheet.

If you need a structured list of firms matching specific criteria, the public search experience becomes limiting quickly.

For example, you may want to find:

• All firms in a specific regulated segment

• Firms with certain permissions

• Firms in a specific region

• Firms with relevant Directory Persons

• Firms connected to particular appointed representative structures

• Firms that have recently changed status

• Firms that match a sales, compliance or acquisition profile

The public Register is not built for that workflow.

The FCA does provide other data access routes, including the Register Extract Service and API access. These can be useful if you have the technical capability to process the raw data.

But raw access is still not the same as an enriched database.

You still need to clean, structure, classify, enrich, monitor and connect the data to the business question you care about.

When you need an enriched FCA database instead

An enriched FCA database starts with the FCA Register, then adds structure, context and usability.

That might include:

• AI-structured firm categorisation

• Natural language search

• Companies House linking

• People and firm relationship mapping

• Directory Persons search

• Appointed representative and principal mapping

• Commercial segmentation

• Saved searches

• Watchlists and alerts

• Exportable firm and people lists

• CRM-ready workflows

• Market maps and change tracking

This is useful when you need to move beyond checking one record at a time.

A sales team may want to build a campaign list of FCA-regulated firms matching an ideal customer profile.

A marketing team may want to segment the regulated market for events or outreach.

A compliance team may want to monitor firms, people, permissions and appointed representative relationships.

An M&A team may want to identify regulated firms that match an acquisition thesis.

Those are not simple Register searches. They are data workflows.

What Distos adds

Distos turns FCA Register data into an AI enriched, searchable database of regulated firms and people.

Instead of searching one firm at a time, users can search, segment and monitor the market using structured FCA data enriched with external sources such as Companies House and other commercial signals.

That means you can move from questions like:

Is this firm authorised?

to questions like:

Which FCA-regulated firms match this exact profile, and what changed since last month?

That is the difference between a public register and a usable intelligence layer.

FCA Register search FAQs

Final thought

FCA Register search is essential. It is the official way to check regulated firms, individuals, permissions and appointed representative relationships.

But it has limits.

It tells you what the FCA records. It does not automatically tell you which firms to target, which people matter, which relationships are commercially important, or what changed across the market.

For one-off checks, use the public FCA Register.

For sales, marketing, M&A, compliance monitoring and market mapping, use an enriched FCA database built around the questions your team actually needs to answer.