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Methodology

How the Irish Credit Institution Register works

Source

Every institution on this register comes from the Central Bank of Ireland's public register of credit institutions at registers.centralbank.ie. The Central Bank's own search groups this register under two internal ids, and this tracker walks both:

  • Register id 2 (Banks) - credit institutions as defined in EU law: undertakings whose business is to receive deposits or other repayable funds from the public and to grant credits for their own account. This includes banks licensed under Section 9 of the Central Bank Act, 1971 and EEA credit institutions operating in Ireland on a branch or freedom-of-services basis.
  • Register id 13 (Designated Credit Institutions) - institutions registered as designated credit institutions under Section 14 of the Asset Covered Securities Act, 2001.

The two walks are combined and deduplicated by CBI reference number. Each entity record carries the following fields, published verbatim from the official register:

  • Entity name and CBI reference number
  • Authorisation status as recorded on the register
  • Authorisations and registrations where the register records them
  • Source URL linking directly to the Central Bank record
  • Date the record was retrieved from the register

Where an institution can be matched to a registered company, we enrich its record with company-registration data from the Companies Registration Office (company number, incorporation date, registered address). CRO enrichment is best-effort and never blocks publication: if the match is uncertain, we leave the field empty rather than guess. Many entries on this register are EEA institutions with no Irish company registration; those simply carry no CRO block.

No EBA EUCLID PSD2 backfill applies to this register - credit institutions are not payment institutions or e-money institutions, so that date source does not cover them. Authorisation dates are published by the Central Bank where available and are copied verbatim; we do not estimate or infer them.

Scope note

This register answers one question: is an institution actually authorised as a credit institution in Ireland? It includes many EEA institutions passporting into Ireland that have no retail presence here. It is a register of authorisations, not a directory of banks with Irish branches, and inclusion says nothing about the products an institution offers. For comparing Irish business current accounts and fees, see our business banking guide.

For business due diligence

The register facts published here - authorisation status, reference number and recorded authorisations - are due-diligence facts: they confirm whether an institution holds a current authorisation to take deposits and lend in Ireland. This surface is for verification, not for ranking or recommending institutions.

Every number on the register can be cited as "as recorded in the Central Bank of Ireland register on [date]", with a link to the individual entity page or the headline anchor. Counts are reproducible: the snapshots and the change ledger live in a public Git repository, so you can verify what we said on any given date.

Cadence

The pipeline runs weekly. It walks the register, normalises every row to one canonical schema, and diffs the result against the previous week's snapshot. Snapshots and the change ledger are committed to a public Git repository, so the full history is auditable.

Baseline established 25 July 2026. Last sync 17 August 2026.

What the diff detects

Comparing this week's snapshot to last week's produces four kinds of event:

  • New authorisation - an entity present this week that was absent last week.
  • Removed from register - an entity present last week that is absent this week.
  • Status changed - the same entity with a different status string.
  • Services changed - the same entity with a different set of recorded authorisations.

Accuracy guardrails

  • No language model in the data path. Every field is copied verbatim from the official register. No figures or entity details are model-generated.
  • Diff sanity check. If more than 15% of the register changes in one run, the pipeline halts and routes the diff to a manual review queue rather than overwriting the snapshot. A swing that large almost always means the register's format changed, not that reality did.
  • Removals are stated plainly. An entity that leaves the register is labelled "removed from register" - exactly as the register records it. We never editorialise a removal as an institution "losing its licence" without the Central Bank's own status wording.
  • Source and date on every row. Each entity links to its Central Bank register page and carries the date we retrieved it.
  • No incomplete walk overwrites a snapshot. If the walk is incomplete (transient outage, format change), no REMOVED events are emitted and the existing snapshot is not overwritten.

Correction policy

If you believe a record here is wrong, the authoritative source is always the Central Bank of Ireland register itself - check the linked CBI page first. If our copy is out of step with the register, tell us and we will correct it on the next sync or sooner. We publish the register; we do not give legal, financial or regulatory advice, and a listing here is not an endorsement.

What this is not

Out of scope by design: deposit-rate or fee comparisons (those live on our business banking and rate gap pages, with their own sources), "best bank" editorial, and any scraping of individual bank websites. This is a record of the official Central Bank register, nothing more.