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Methodology

How the Irish MiFID Investment Firm 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 authorised as Investment Firms under Regulation 8(3) of the European Union (Markets in Financial Instruments) Regulations 2017 (S.I. No. 375 of 2017), which transposed Directive 2014/65/EU (MiFID II) into Irish law, and are supervised by the Central Bank of Ireland.

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 services 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. 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. MiFID investment firms 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 id this covers

This tracker walks CBI register id 32, the register of investment firms authorised under Regulation 8(3) of the European Union (Markets in Financial Instruments) Regulations 2017. Every firm listed here carries that authorisation. The Central Bank's neighbouring register id 5 covers product producers under the Investment Intermediaries Act, 1995, which is a different authorisation regime; it is deliberately excluded from this surface, although some firms hold both authorisations and list both on their CBI record.

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 trustees to verify that an investment firm 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, and services. 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: the register can include sole traders and individuals trading under their own name. Because the Central Bank publishes no address field for this register, no natural-person address can enter the dataset from the CBI. Addresses are added only through CRO enrichment of registered companies; entities that cannot be matched to a CRO company record carry no address at all. When in doubt, the address is omitted.

For business due diligence

The register facts published here - authorised status, reference number, and recorded services - are supplier due-diligence facts: they confirm whether a firm is authorised as an Investment Firm under the European Union (Markets in Financial Instruments) Regulations 2017. This surface is intended for Irish businesses and trustees verifying that an investment firm, wealth manager or broker-dealer is authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland before engaging them, not for investment-product comparison or 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 24 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 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 firm "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 are an individual (sole trader or natural person) listed on this register and wish to object to any data we publish about you, 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: investment performance data, fee comparisons, "best investment firm" 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.