Skip to content

Methodology

How the Irish Insurance Undertaking Register works

Source

Every firm on this register comes from the Central Bank of Ireland's public registers at registers.centralbank.ie. The firms listed are insurance undertakings authorised to carry on insurance business in Ireland, supervised by the Central Bank of Ireland under the European Union (Insurance and Reinsurance) Regulations 2015 (S.I. No. 485 of 2015), which transposed the Solvency II Directive (2009/138/EC) into Irish law.

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
  • Authorised classes of business where the register records them
  • Source URL linking directly to the Central Bank record
  • Date the record was retrieved from the register

The Central Bank does not publish an address field for this register, so no address is sourced from the CBI. We verified this directly against the live firm-detail page for both Freedom-of-Services entities and Irish-authorised undertakings: neither carries the firm-address span present on some other CBI registers. We never fall back to the Central Bank's own contact address that appears in the page footer of every firm-detail page. Where a firm 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. Any address shown on this surface comes from that CRO enrichment, never from the CBI register.

No EBA EUCLID backfill applies to this register. Insurance undertakings are not PSD2 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.

Which register ids this covers

This tracker walks CBI register ids 17 (Life), 18 (Non-Life), 19 (Life - Freedom of Services), 20 (Non-Life - Freedom of Services), 21 (Re-insurance) and 69 - an additional subtype the Central Bank folds into its own "All" aggregate for this firm type without a named label on the register picker. Entities are deduplicated by CBI reference number across all six ids, so a firm authorised under more than one subtype appears once.

GDPR - legal basis and data minimisation

The register is a statutory public record maintained by the Central Bank of Ireland. Publication of its contents in a searchable, linkable form is grounded in the following legal basis under the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679:

  • Article 6(1)(e) GDPR - public task / legitimate interests of the controller: the register exists precisely to enable verification of a firm's authorisation status by clients, counterparties, and the public. Re-publishing it in a structured, citable form serves that same public interest.
  • Legitimate Interest Assessment (LIA): the purpose (enabling businesses and brokers to verify that an insurer is authorised) is legitimate and proportionate. The data published here is restricted to what the Central Bank itself makes publicly available: entity name, reference number, status, address and authorised classes of business. We do not publish contact details, personal email addresses, phone numbers, or any data beyond the register record and CRO company data.
  • Data minimisation for natural persons: insurance undertakings are corporate entities by the nature of the authorisation regime; the register is not expected to include sole traders or named individuals. If a future sync ever encounters an entity name that reads as a natural person rather than a company, that address is suppressed in the same way as our other registers - when in doubt, the address is omitted.

For business due diligence

The register facts published here - authorised status, reference number, and recorded classes of business - are supplier due-diligence facts: they confirm whether an insurer is authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland. This surface is intended for Irish businesses and brokers verifying that an insurer is authorised before placing cover with them, not for policy comparison or insurance advice.

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 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 3 September 2026. Last sync 21 September 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 classes of business.

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.
  • Footer-address guard. The Central Bank renders its own contact address in a footer box on every firm-detail page. If three or more entities in a run would otherwise share that one identical address value, the pipeline treats it as a parsing failure and nulls the address field for the whole register rather than publish an obviously wrong value.
  • 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 insurer "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 and objection

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.

If you believe our copy of your firm's data is incorrect, contact us with your CBI reference number. We will review your case within 10 working days. Note that the register itself is a statutory public record maintained by the Central Bank; our correction policy governs our copy only.

What this is not

Out of scope by design: policy pricing, claims-handling comparisons, "best insurer" editorial, RBO beneficial-ownership data, personal contact details, and any scraping of individual firm websites. This is a record of the official Central Bank register, nothing more.