How to Search the FCA Register by Company Type

The FCA Register is the official source for checking regulated firms, individuals and permissions. It is useful when you already know who you are looking for: a firm name, trading name, individual name or firm reference number. It is much less useful when your question is commercial or market led, such as:

• Show me all UK wealth managers.
• Find FCA-regulated hedge fund managers.
• Build a list of mortgage brokers.
• Identify e-money institutions and payment firms.
• Segment financial advice firms from asset managers.

That is not a criticism of the FCA Register. It was built as a regulatory record and verification tool, not as a commercial segmentation database.

The difficult part is that FCA permissions do not map neatly to company type. A permission can tell you what a firm is authorised to do. It does not always tell you what the firm is in market terms, how it describes itself, who it serves, or which dataset a sales, M&A, compliance or research team would expect it to appear in.

This is why company type search needs an enrichment layer to become possible.

What you can search on the FCA Register today

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

On the FCA Register, you can search for firms and individuals. In practice, this is strongest when you already have a known entity to check, meaning you already know one of the following bits of information:

• Firm name.
• Trading name.
• Individual name.
• Firm reference number.

That makes the FCA Register extremely useful for verification. If you need to check whether a named firm appears on the official record, whether it has relevant permissions, or whether a known person is connected to a firm, the FCA Register is the right place to start.

But that is a different job from discovery, and finding the firms that make up a whole market segment.

If you want to discover every wealth manager, hedge fund or insurance broker, the FCA Register does not give you a simple company type search filter that solves the problem. You can inspect records one by one, and you can use permissions as clues, but you still need judgement, enrichment and cross checking.

For a broader primer on what the Register can and cannot do, see FCA Register Search: What You Can and Cannot Find. For a more general search walkthrough, see FCA Register Database: How to Search UK Regulated Firms and People.

Why company type is different from FCA permission

Company type is a commercial classification where as permission is a regulatory concept. Those two things can often overlap, but they are not the same.

A firm may hold permissions that are common among financial advisers, wealth managers, asset managers or corporate finance advisers. But the permission alone does not always explain the firm's business model.

For example:

• A financial advice firm and a wealth manager may hold overlapping investment-related permissions.
• An asset manager and a hedge fund manager may sit close together in regulatory-permission terms, but users often want hedge fund managers as a distinct dataset.
• A corporate finance advisory boutique may not be obvious from permissions alone without website and company-context review.
• A payment firm, e-money institution, FX broker and remittance provider may need more context than one permission field provides.
• A firm may hold a permission for a limited reason that does not define its main commercial identity.

This matters because most business workflows are type-led. A sales team does not usually ask, "Which firms hold permission X?" It asks, "Which firms look like our ICP?"

A corporate finance or PE firm doing research for M&A does not only ask, "Which firms have this regulated activity?" It asks, "Which advice firms, wealth managers or specialist asset managers fit our thesis?"

A market researcher does not just need a permission list - they need a usable segmentation of the market.

Why an FCA permission does not prove a firm is a wealth manager, hedge fund or asset manager

The common mistake is treating a permission as a label which can result in both false positives and false negatives.

A false positive happens when a firm has a permission that looks relevant, but the firm is not really the type of company you are trying to find. For example, a firm may hold investment-related permissions but operate primarily as a broader advice, planning, platform, corporate finance or specialist services business.

A false negative happens when a firm belongs in the commercial category you care about, but it is not obvious from the permission you searched. The clue may sit in the firm's website, Companies House record, trading name, ownership structure, fund documentation, public descriptions or client proposition.

This is why permission led searches can become frustrating. They are precise in one sense, but not always useful in the way commercial teams need.

If you are building a list of wealth managers, you do not only want firms with a possible relevant permission. You want firms that actually present and operate as wealth managers or private client investment managers.

If you are building a list of hedge fund managers, you do not want every asset-management-adjacent firm. You want the specialist subset that users explicitly recognise as hedge fund managers.

If you are building a list of mortgage brokers, you want mortgage brokerage and advice firms, not a broad set of firms where the permission picture needs manual interpretation.

That classification problem is not solved by raw FCA data alone.

This is also why a generic list of FCA registered firms is only a starting point. A list tells you who is in the regulated universe. It does not automatically tell you which firms belong in the commercial category you need.

Can you get a list of firms by company type through an FOI request?

Unfortunately not. People regularly try to use Freedom of Information requests to get lists of FCA regulated firms by type. The problem is that the FCA's records are permission led, not built around every commercial category a researcher might ask for. They simply don't store 'what type of company is this' against each record - it's not information they even have.

In a May 2025 FOI response about authorised asset management firms and permissions, the FCA explained that it could not provide a list of firms regulated to manage assets because it did not have specific definitions for "managing assets" or "asset managers". The FCA's key point was that "we categorise firms by reference to the permissions which they hold."

If the regulator itself is saying that a requested company-type list cannot be produced directly because the underlying categorisation is permission-based, a researcher should be careful about assuming that a simple FCA Register search, API lookup or export will return a clean list of "asset managers", "wealth managers" or "hedge funds".

The data is valuable. But it has to be transformed before it becomes a reliable company type dataset.

Manual workaround: how researchers try to infer company type

If you are trying to identify company type manually, the usual workflow looks something like this:

1. Start with FCA Register records.
2. Filter or search by relevant permissions.
3. Review firm names and trading names.
4. Cross-check Companies House records.
5. Look for the firm's website or social profiles like LinkedIn
6. Read the website and profiles to understand its proposition.
7. Check public descriptions, directories, filings and other sources.
8. Decide whether the firm belongs in the category.
9. Save the decision in a spreadsheet.
10. Repeat the process over and over again one by one

That workflow can work for a small sample but its not practical across thousands of firms.

The hard parts are not just technical. They are interpretive:

• A permission may be too broad.
• A firm may have no obvious website in the FCA record.
• The website may use brand language rather than regulatory terminology.
• The Companies House entity may not make the commercial proposition clear.
• Firms can operate across more than one category.
• A firm can change its proposition over time.
• Manual classifications become stale unless someone monitors changes.

For one company, a researcher can make a judgement. For the whole FCA regulated market, the process needs a classification system.

How Distos classifies FCA-regulated firms by type

Distos is the AI native data and intelligence platform mapping firms and people in the regulated financial services market. Distos begins with company data, layers in FCA regulated firm data, including the FCA Register and weekly FCA RES extract, then enriches the raw records into a searchable intelligence layer.

The point is not to replace the FCA Register. The FCA Register remains the official source for regulatory records. Distos adds the commercial segmentation layer that the FCA Register was not designed to provide.

At a high level, the workflow is:

• Ingest raw company data.
• Cross reference with FCA firm data and weekly updates.
• Enrich records with Companies House and other public company sources.
• Resolve and enrich firm websites where the raw record does not provide enough context.
• Cross-reference firm names, trading names, company numbers, people, addresses and public information.
• Use AI agents and classification models to review enriched firm context.
• Assign searchable company-type categories.
• Use AI and human review to verify data accuracy at scale.
• Make those categories available for search, segmentation, monitoring and exports in the Distos platform.

This matters because company type is rarely sitting in one perfect field.

To classify a firm as a wealth manager, mortgage broker, hedge fund manager or corporate finance adviser, the system has to combine multiple signals. Permissions may be one signal. The firm's website may be another. Companies House records, public formation data, ownership context, trading names and other public sources may also contribute.

The Distos classification model turns raw regulatory records into a market map.

Company types available as Distos search criteria

Distos makes company type available as searchable criteria so users can start with the market segment they actually care about.

These categories are designed for the way people actually search the market.

Someone looking for hedge fund managers should not have to build a fragile permissions query, export records, inspect websites and manually remove every false positive. Someone building a target list of mortgage brokers should not have to treat regulatory permissions as if they were a complete commercial taxonomy. Distos makes the category searchable directly.

When company type search matters

FCA company type search is useful whenever the user's question starts with a market segment rather than a known firm.

Common examples include:

• Sales teams building target account lists for regulated financial services.
• Marketing teams building ABM, event, webinar or campaign audiences.
• M&A and PE teams mapping acquisition targets.
• Asset managers and platforms identifying adviser, wealth or distribution firms.
• Compliance and legal teams monitoring a segment of firms.
• Recruiters mapping firms in a regulated sector.
• Market researchers sizing and tracking parts of the UK financial services market.
• Professional services teams finding firms that match a regulated-sector profile.

In all of those cases, the workflow is bigger than checking one firm.

The user needs to search, segment, compare, export and monitor groups of firms. They still need the raw FCA Register data as the official source but they also need enriched context that turns regulatory records into usable market intelligence.