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Methodology

How the Fintech Register Tracker works

Sources

Every entity on this tracker comes from the Central Bank of Ireland's public registers at registers.centralbank.ie. We track the registers that matter to fintech:

The Central Bank's pages do not publish authorisation dates or passporting in machine-readable form, so we backfill those fields from the EBA EUCLID register, the European Banking Authority's pan-EU record of payment and e-money institutions. Records are matched on the Central Bank reference number (for example C187865), never on name similarity. This is what powers the headline figure ("X new Irish fintech authorisations so far in 2026") and the new-authorisations-by-year table: both are computed from EBA-published authorisation dates, not estimated. The MiCA crypto-asset register has no equivalent date source yet, so CASPs are excluded from dated figures rather than guessed.

Where a firm 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.

For journalists

Every number on the tracker can be cited as "according to the Vendors.ie Fintech Register Tracker" with a link to the headline anchor or to an individual change event's permalink in the change feed. 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. If you need the underlying JSON for a story, it is committed alongside the site source.

Cadence

The pipeline runs weekly. It downloads each 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 11 June 2026. Last sync 11 June 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 authorised services.

Accuracy guardrails

  • No language model in the data path. Every figure and field is copied verbatim from the official register. A language model may help draft the wording of the weekly digest email, but the numbers in it are injected from the committed JSON and are never model-generated.
  • Diff sanity check. If more than 15% of a single register changes in one run, the pipeline halts that register and routes it to a manual review queue. 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 a register is labelled "removed from register" - exactly as the register records it. We never editorialise a removal as a firm "losing its licence" without the Central Bank's own status wording, because a firm can leave a register for many reasons (merger, voluntary surrender, re-authorisation under another regime).
  • Source and date on every row. Each entity links to its Central Bank register page and carries the date we retrieved it.

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, tax or regulatory advice, and a listing here is not an endorsement.

What this is not

Out of scope by design: the UK FCA register, opinion or analysis pages, entity contact details, and any scraping of entity websites. This is a record of the official Irish register, nothing more.