Insights & Trends
How to use the FCA Register to identify IFA firms
How can distribution teams, asset managers and private equity consolidators use the FCA register to find target independent financial advisor and wealth management firms?
The FCA Financial Services Register is the single authoritative source for identifying UK regulated financial advice firms. It's free, it's maintained by the regulator, and every authorised adviser and firm in the country is on it. In principle it should be the obvious starting point for anyone building a prospecting list, M&A pipeline, or partnership map targeting UK IFAs.
In practice, getting from "I want a list of UK IFAs" to "here is a clean, segmented list I can act on" using the Register alone is harder than it looks. This guide walks through exactly how to do it, where the Register takes you, and where it stops. We've built Siorra on top of the Register, so we've lived this problem closely — and we'll be honest about where our product exists because the Register runs out of answers.
How to identify financial advisors on the FCA register
First, a definitional problem you need to resolve. There is no field on the FCA Register that says "this firm is an IFA or wealth management firm." The term "IFA" is a market convention, not a regulatory classification. Before you touch the Register, you need to decide what you actually mean.
The useful working definition for most B2B targeting is: a firm authorised by the FCA to provide investment advice to retail clients, which describes itself as offering independent or whole-of-market advice. That's two tests — a regulatory one (permissions) and a self-description one (website, FCA filings, trade body membership). The Register can answer the first. It cannot answer the second. But at Siorra, we've built the technology to accurately do the latter as well.
Some further decisions worth making up front:
Do you include restricted advisers? Post-RDR, firms must disclose whether their advice is "independent" or "restricted." St. James's Place, for example, is a restricted firm. If your ICP is "everyone who advises retail clients on investments," you include them; if it's strictly independent advisers, you don't.
Do you include wealth managers? Most wealth managers are dual-authorised for advice and discretionary portfolio management. Some IFAs outsource their investment management; some don't. The line is fuzzy.
Do you include appointed representatives? A large portion of UK advice delivery happens through AR networks — Quilter, True Potential, Openwork, Fairstone, Tenet (until its wind-down), The Sesame Bankhall Group. An AR is authorised via its principal, not directly. You need to decide whether you treat them as firms in their own right.
What about mortgage and protection brokers? They hold different permissions and are a fundamentally different channel, but many smaller advice firms hold both investment and mortgage permissions.
Your ICP defines your approach. We'll assume for the rest of this guide that you're targeting firms authorised to provide investment advice to retail clients — the broadest reasonable definition of "UK IFA."
The two ways to access the FCA Register data
There are two ways to use the Register for list-building, and the right choice depends on your volume and how often you need refresh.
The public search interface at register.fca.org.uk lets you look up one firm at a time by name, FRN, or individual name. It's fine for due diligence on a known firm. It is not a prospecting tool. There is no bulk export, no category filter for "advice firms," and no way to download results.
The free developer API is the actual workhorse. It's a RESTful JSON API documented at register.fca.org.uk/Developer/s/. You register for an account, get an API token, and authenticate every request with your email and token in HTTP headers. It's rate-limited to 50 requests per 10 seconds. Exceed that and you get timeout errors or a temporary suspension.
If you need a full market list with regular refresh and you have a budget, there's a third option: the Register Extract Service (RES). That's a paid, licensed bulk data feed direct from the FCA — approximately £20k/year for reseller use, with direct enquiries going to data.extract@fca.org.uk. For anyone building a serious data product or running ongoing targeting at scale, RES is the correct answer. For a one-off list build, the free API is workable.
The rest of this guide assumes you're using the free API, because that's what most B2B teams will start with.
Step 1: Resolve your target list of FRNs
Here's the first genuine problem. The free API gives you data about firms when you know their FRN, but it doesn't give you a way to retrieve every FRN matching a set of criteria. There is a Search endpoint, but it searches by name or keyword — not by permission or firm type.
This means you can't simply query the API for "all firms with 'Advising on investments' permission." That query doesn't exist.
In practice there are three workable routes:
Start from a seed list. If you already have a list of candidate FRNs — from a previous prospecting exercise, a partner's CRM, a trade press list, or a consultancy directory — use those as your input and enrich them via the API. This is the most common starting point for teams who already know roughly who they're targeting.
Iterate through a known FRN range. FCA FRNs are roughly sequential by authorisation date. Firms authorised in the 1990s have FRNs in the low six figures; firms authorised recently have FRNs well above 900,000. You can iterate through a range and call the
Firm Detailsendpoint for each one, discarding non-matches. This works but is slow: at 50 requests per 10 seconds, covering 700,000 FRNs takes around 40 hours of API time, and most of those will be retail, insurance, credit or banking firms — not advisers.Use the Register website's built-in search as a seed. The public search lets you search by firm type (e.g. "regulated firm") and filter by permission in the UI. You can't export it, but you can use it to generate a seed list of candidate FRNs to then enrich via the API.
Most teams end up using a combination. The practical starting point: seed from a list of around 5,000 known UK advice firms (this is a roughly known universe — the market has around 27,000 advisers across approximately 5,000 firms), and enrich systematically.
Step 2: Pull firm-level data for each FRN
Once you have your FRN list, you enrich each one by calling the Firm Details endpoint:
The response gives you the firm's legal name, FCA status (Authorised, Cancelled, In Administration, etc.), sub-status, business type, Companies House number, mutual society number, MLRs status, and a set of URLs pointing to related endpoints for permissions, individuals, addresses, regulators, passports, and so on.
Critically, it does not return permissions directly — you have to make a second call to the Permissions endpoint:
This returns the firm's regulated activities, client types (retail, professional, eligible counterparty), investment types, and limitations. To filter for IFA firms specifically, you're looking for:
"Advising on investments (except on Pension Transfers and Pension Opt Outs)" or the variant "Advising on investments (excluding P2P agreements)"
Client type including Retail (Investment)
Ideally, "Arranging (bringing about) deals in investments" — most advice firms hold this too
You may also care about:
"Advising on Pension Transfers" — a specialist subset, materially riskier post the British Steel Pension Scheme cases
"Managing investments" — if the firm is dual-authorised as a discretionary manager
"Insurance distribution" — if you're including protection advisers
What the Register doesn't distinguish is independent versus restricted advice. That distinction is a conduct rule under RDR, not a permission. A restricted firm and an independent firm can hold identical Register permissions — the difference is in how they behave and disclose, not in what they're authorised to do. To know which a firm is, you have to look at its website, its disclosure documents, or its own statutory filings.
For each firm you'll probably want to pull:
Endpoint | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Firm name, status, Companies House number |
| Regulated activities, client types, investment types |
| Principal place of business, complaints address, phone, website |
| Trading and brand names (current and previous) |
| Approved individuals at the firm |
| Appointed representative relationships (both directions) |
| Enforcement actions against the firm |
That's seven API calls per firm. For 5,000 firms that's 35,000 calls, which at the rate limit takes roughly two hours of polling time if you're sequential, or less with sensible batching.
Step 3: Resolve appointed representatives to principals (or vice versa)
This is the step most teams get wrong. In the UK advice market, a large chunk of "advice firms" you'll encounter are ARs, not directly authorised firms. An AR is authorised via its principal, which is the firm that carries the regulatory responsibility.
If you're prospecting, you probably care about both — the AR is the operational firm that writes business, the principal is where the regulatory relationship sits. Depending on your use case, one of them is your buyer.
The Register exposes AR relationships via:
This returns both current and previous AR relationships, in both directions. If you call it on a principal FRN you get its ARs; if you call it on an AR FRN you get its principal.
Practical point: a firm's AR list can run to hundreds of entries for large networks. Quilter, for example, has an AR network in the thousands historically. Paginate properly and handle the response carefully — the Register API paginates via Next URLs in the ResultInfo object.
Step 4: Pull individuals to understand firm composition
The Firm/{FRN}/Individuals endpoint returns the individuals (approved persons and certified individuals) associated with a firm. For each one you get an IRN (Individual Reference Number) and a status:
Approved by regulator— currently holds a controlled functionCertified / assessed by firm— certified under the Senior Managers & Certification RegimeProhibited— subject to a prohibition orderRegulatory approval no longer required— left the role
For IFA firm intelligence, you particularly care about:
SMF functions — SMF1 (Chief Executive), SMF3 (Executive Director), SMF9 (Chair), SMF16 (Compliance Oversight), SMF17 (MLRO). These are the regulated senior leadership.
CF30 (legacy Customer Function) and [FCA CF] Functions requiring qualifications — the current designation for customer-facing advisers post-SMCR.
Start dates and end dates — useful for detecting adviser movements, new hires, and departures.
You can correlate an individual across firms by calling /V0.1/Individuals/{IRN}/CF to see every firm they've held a controlled function at. That's how you spot an adviser who has moved from a consolidator back to a small IFA, or a compliance officer who's joined three different firms in two years.
Step 5: Correlate with Companies House
The Register tells you a firm is authorised. It tells you almost nothing about its financial shape.
Every limited-company IFA firm in the UK files accounts at Companies House. That's where revenue, profit, balance sheet, employee count, and ownership structure live. The Register and Companies House are not linked — you have to match them yourself.
The Firm Details endpoint includes a Companies House Number field for most firms, which makes this reasonably straightforward if the field is populated. When it isn't, you're matching on firm name and address, which is error-prone: firms restructure, rebrand, move holding companies, and file under subsidiary entities that aren't the authorised entity. Expect 10–20% of matches to require manual review.
Companies House offers its own free API and a streaming endpoint for real-time filings. If you care about ownership changes, director appointments, and PSC filings as prospecting signals, wire up the stream.
Once correlated, you can derive useful proxies:
Revenue as a proxy for firm size and AUM
Employee count (sometimes disclosed, often not under small-company exemptions) as a proxy for adviser headcount
Director age (via appointment dates and PSC filings) as a proxy for succession stage
Ownership changes as M&A activity
All of these require interpretation. Small-company filings disclose very little; many IFA firms are structured as LLPs or partnerships, which file under different rules; some file abbreviated accounts that strip out most of what you'd want to see. Getting useful financial signal out of Companies House for the long tail of small IFA firms is genuinely hard.
Step 6: What the Register does not give you
This is where honest B2B teams stop and reassess.
The Register will tell you, with complete authority:
Who is authorised
What permissions they hold
What their regulatory status is
Who works there in a regulated capacity
Whether they've had enforcement action
It will not tell you:
AUM or assets under advice
Advice specialism (retirement, estate planning, DC pensions, protection, intergenerational wealth, etc.)
Client segment (mass market, HNW, UHNW, institutional)
Platform usage (which wrap platform(s) they place business on)
Fee model (fixed fee, percentage of assets, hourly, blended)
Whether they describe themselves as independent or restricted
Growth trajectory (new clients, revenue trend, adviser hiring)
Succession stage (owner age, exit planning activity)
Network or consolidator affiliation beyond the AR relationship
Soft signals — website updates, job postings, LinkedIn activity, client reviews, FOS complaints
Every one of those is something a serious B2B buyer — an asset manager targeting fund placement, a PE-backed consolidator screening targets, a platform competing for flows — actually cares about. None of them are in the Register.
This is the genuine limit of the Register as a prospecting tool. You can build a clean, complete list of every authorised advice firm in the UK using the techniques above, and it will still not be a list you can act on for any commercially meaningful ICP, because the ICP criteria live outside the Register.
What to do when you hit the limit
Three options, depending on budget and ambition.
Build your own enrichment layer. The most labour-intensive option: take your Register-derived list, add Companies House data for financials, scrape each firm's website for self-description and specialisms, monitor LinkedIn for adviser movements, pull FOS data for complaints, and correlate it all yourself. This is what every serious data vendor in this market has done. It takes engineering resource and ongoing maintenance — realistically a small team.
Use Siorra. We built Siorra specifically to close this gap. It starts with the Register (via the RES bulk feed), correlates to Companies House, and then layers in the signals the Register can't give you: AUM banding, advice specialism, platform exposure, succession stage, fee model, adviser movements over time, website changes, FOS signals, trade press mentions. The resulting dataset is what the Register would look like if it had been designed for B2B intelligence rather than regulatory transparency.
If you've read this far, you're already sophisticated enough to know which of those three makes sense for your team. The answer depends almost entirely on whether the list is a one-off or an ongoing capability, and on how much of your commercial strategy rests on targeting precision.
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