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Methodology

How the Irish Credit Union Register works

Source

Every credit union on this register comes from the Central Bank of Ireland's public Register of Credit Unions (register id 15) at registers.centralbank.ie. Credit unions are registered under the Credit Union Act, 1997 and supervised by the Central Bank of Ireland. Registration text as published on the register: "Registered as a Credit Union under the Credit Union Act, 1997."

Each entity record carries the following fields, published verbatim from the official register:

  • Entity name and CBI reference number
  • Registration status as recorded on the register
  • Authorised services, including any payment-services entitlements recorded
  • Registered address
  • Source URL linking directly to the Central Bank record
  • Date the record was retrieved from the register

Where a credit union can be matched, we enrich its record with company-registration data from the Companies Registration Office (company number, incorporation date). CRO enrichment is best-effort and never blocks publication: if the match is uncertain, we leave the field empty rather than guess.

No EBA EUCLID backfill applies to this register. Credit unions are domestic mutual-finance bodies, not PSD2 payment institutions or e-money institutions, so there is no pan-European date source to draw on.

Register id 37 (Payment Services Directive - Credit Union)

The Central Bank also maintains register id 37, "Payment Services Directive - Credit Union", which lists credit unions holding payment-services entitlements. The same 185 firms appear on both registers. This tracker uses register id 15 as the canonical walk; payment-services entitlements are captured from the entity detail page for each firm (which lists all registers a firm appears on), so no separate walk of register id 37 is required.

For business due diligence

The register facts published here - registered status, reference number, registration text, payment-services entitlement - are supplier due-diligence facts: they confirm whether a credit union is a regulated body under the Credit Union Act, 1997, and what authorised services it holds. This surface is intended for businesses verifying the regulated status of a credit union they deal with, not for consumer financial-product comparison.

Every number on the register can be cited as "as recorded in the Central Bank of Ireland Register of Credit Unions 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 downloads 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 22 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 registration - 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 authorised services.

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 export 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 a credit union "losing its authorisation" 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: financial performance data, savings-rate comparisons, "best credit union" editorial, RBO beneficial-ownership data, officer home addresses or dates of birth, and any scraping of individual credit union websites. This is a record of the official Central Bank register, nothing more.