EU Financial Licence & Warning List Check

Before you pay, deposit with, invest through or onboard a financial firm or crypto platform, ask one question: is it authorised in the EU, and is it on a regulator's warning list?

This Actor checks a firm by name, LEI, registration number and/or website against the EU-level public registers (ESMA, EBA, ECB, the MiCA register) and national warning lists (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, plus the EU-wide MiCA list of non-compliant crypto firms). It returns a verdict, ALLOW, REVIEW or BLOCK, with the reasons, the matching register entries (what the firm is authorised for, since when, withdrawn when, where it is passported), and for every source the date of the data used.

It is built for KYB and onboarding checks, payment and treasury agents, and AI agents that move money. It does not replace a compliance officer. Not legal advice, not investment advice: see "Limits" below.

What you get per firm

Field	Meaning
verdict	ALLOW (active authorisation found, nothing against it), REVIEW (a human checks first), BLOCK (warning list or EU sanctions hit)
status	licensed, licensed_and_warned, warned, sanctioned, licence_withdrawn, possible_match, not_found, not_covered
reasons	One line per rule that fired
licences	Up to 5 register entries: register, authority, type, status, authorised_since, withdrawn_on, passported_to, services, match method and confidence, history
warnings, sanctions	Up to 5 warning-list / EU-sanctions entries that match, with date and match confidence
lookalike_domains	Warning-list websites that look like yours (one character off, or same name on another extension). Shown, not counted as a match
claimed_licence	Whether the licence the firm claims is covered by our sources and found (active)
coverage	Per source: checked / stale / unavailable, and data_as_of
history	When our daily records first saw the entry and what changed since
attribution, disclaimer	Source acknowledgements required by the publishers, and the limits

not_found and not_covered are different answers:

• not_found: we searched every source that covers this kind of firm and found nothing. For a firm that claims a bank, payment, e-money, investment or MiCA licence in the EU, that is a red flag.
• not_covered: the licence the firm claims (for example insurance, consumer credit or a purely national licence) or its country is not in our sources. We cannot say anything about it; check the national register.

Input

{"name": "Mollie B.V.", "country": "NL",
 "claimed_licence": "e-money institution NL", "as_of": "2026-10-28"}

Give at least one of name, lei, reg_number, domain. Batch: {"entities": [{...}, {...}]} (up to 500).

• claimed_licence: free text ("payment institution NL", "MiCA CASP", "bank") or {"type": "emi", "country": "NL"}. Types: bank, payment_institution, emi, aisp, pisp, investment_firm, aifm, ucits_manco, crowdfunding, trading_venue, casp, emt_issuer, art_issuer.
• as_of: the status on a past date, from the registers' own authorisation and withdrawal dates where they publish them, otherwise from our recorded history. Before our history starts for a register without dates, the answer is unknown (never a guess).
• refresh: auto (default) refetches any source older than max_age_hours (default 48) from the official file at the start of the run; never uses the bundled data only; always refetches everything.
• resolve_lei (default on): looks up the LEI's legal name at GLEIF, so registers that list the firm without its LEI still match.

Example output (shortened)

{"verdict": "BLOCK", "status": "warned",
 "reasons": ["On a warning list: AFM (NL) lists '24era' (exact_name, 2024-07-02)",
             "On a warning list: FSMA (BE) lists '24era.com' (domain, 2024-08-29)"],
 "warnings": [{"source": "afm_warnings", "name": "24era", "date": "2024-07-02",
               "match": {"method": "exact_name", "confidence": 0.95}, "data_as_of": "2026-10-28T07:21:11+00:00"}]}

How matching works

Method	Confidence
LEI or registration number equal	1.00
Same name after normalising case, accents, punctuation, legal form spelling	0.95
Same name without the legal form (B.V., GmbH, Ltd, S.A., UAB...)	0.90
Similar name (token-sorted similarity of 0.88 or more)	0.60 to 0.85
Same website domain	0.95
Name matches but the firm's home country differs from yours (and it is not passported there)	minus 0.10

Only matches of 0.90 or more can lead to ALLOW or BLOCK. Weaker matches lead to REVIEW.

Rules worth knowing:

• Clones and impersonation. Fraudsters copy the names of real banks and brokers, and warning lists then carry that name too. When a licensed firm's name also appears on a warning list, the result is REVIEW unless you give the domain you deal with and the register confirms it. If your domain is the one on the warning list, it is BLOCK.
• A REVIEW is also given when a licence is withdrawn, when only a similar name matches, when the domain you give differs from the domain in the register, when a source could not be read, or when a warning list is more than 7 days old. ALLOW is never given while a warning list is missing.
• Domain confirmation needs the register to publish a domain. The MiCA registers and the AMF PSAN list carry a website for almost every entry, so a domain you give is actively checked against them. The ECB bank list and the EBA payment/e-money register currently publish none, and the ESMA MiFID register has one for only a small share of firms. When you give a domain that the register cannot confirm, the verdict is REVIEW with the reason domain_unconfirmed (a real firm's name with a made-up domain is exactly what impersonators send). The domain is still checked against warning lists and sanctions. If you only want the licence status, leave domain out; to confirm a bank's or payment/e-money institution's website, use the regulator's own register page.
• Warning lists can name natural persons. We return only the entries that match what you send, and there is no search or bulk export. E-mail addresses on the AMF list are reduced to their domain.

Coverage

Licence registers (who is authorised):

Source	Covers	Countries	Dates in the source
ESMA register of investment firms (MiFID II)	Investment firms, AIFMs, UCITS management companies, crowdfunding providers, trading venues, branches	EU + NO, IS, LI	Authorisation and withdrawal dates
EBA register of payment and e-money institutions	Payment institutions, e-money institutions, account information providers, exempted institutions, branches, firms notified as outside PSD2 scope	EU + NO, IS, LI	Authorisation and withdrawal dates
ECB list of monetary financial institutions	Credit institutions (banks) and their branches, money market funds	EU-27 (not NO, IS, LI)	None: we record entries and exits from 2026-10-28
ESMA interim MiCA register	Authorised crypto-asset service providers (CASPs), e-money and asset-referenced token issuers	EU + NO, IS, LI	Authorisation date
AMF list of PSAN	French digital-asset providers under the pre-MiCA regime (most registrations ended in 2026)	FR	Registration and end dates

Warning lists and sanctions:

Source	Covers	Countries
ESMA interim MiCA register, non-compliant entities	Crypto services offered without MiCA authorisation, reported by every national authority	EU + NO, IS, LI
AMF listes noires	Unauthorised forex, binary options, crypto derivatives, miscellaneous goods schemes, identity theft	FR
FSMA list of companies operating unlawfully	Fraudulent platforms, clones, unauthorised offers	BE
AFM warning list	Firms the AFM warns against	NL
EU consolidated financial sanctions list	Legal entities under EU asset freezes (no natural persons)	EU

Per country, this means:

Country	Banks	Payment / e-money	Investment firms	Crypto (MiCA)	National warning list
FR	yes	yes	yes	yes, plus PSAN	yes (AMF)
BE	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes (FSMA)
NL	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes (AFM)
Other EU-27	yes	yes	yes	yes	only the EU-wide MiCA non-compliant list
NO, IS, LI	no	yes	yes	yes	only the EU-wide MiCA non-compliant list
UK, CH, rest of world	no	no	no	no	no

Not covered yet: IOSCO I-SCAN, BaFin (DE), CONSOB (IT) and CNMV (ES) warnings, the UK FCA, insurance companies and intermediaries, and purely national licences (consumer credit, mortgage advice, trust offices, financial service providers registered only nationally). The not_covered field in every result lists them.

How up to date is the data?

What	How often	Where you see it
Our copy of each register and warning list	Read from the official file every day (ESMA MiFID and EBA at 10:25, ECB MFI list and AFM / FSMA / AMF lists at 10:40, MiCA registers and EU sanctions at 20:05, Amsterdam time)	history in each result
The data bundled in this Actor	Rebuilt and republished every day at about 11:15 Amsterdam time from the latest daily copies, after the full test suite passes	coverage[].data_as_of per source, in every result
Live refresh during your run	refresh: auto (default): any source older than max_age_hours (48 h) is fetched live from the official file at the start of your run. always: every source. never: bundled data only	the same data_as_of (then the time of your run)

So with the defaults, an answer is never based on a source copy older than 48 hours, and normally on one from the same or the previous day. data_as_of is when we last read the official file; each authority updates its own register on its own schedule, so a decision made today may appear in its file later.

History. On top of the registers' own dates we keep every change we see, so answers can say "first seen on", "left the list on" or "first warned on". That history starts on 2026-10-26/28 (per source, shown in each result as our_history_starts) and grows every day.

Pricing

Pay per event: one licence-check event per firm checked. Items rejected for bad input are not charged. A check where a source was down still returns a verdict (never ALLOW in that case) and is charged.

Limits

• Indicative only. Not legal advice, not investment or compliance advice. Registers can lag the authority's decisions by days or weeks; confirm on the authority's own register before you rely on a result.
• A firm missing from a list is not proof it is safe: warning lists only contain firms an authority has noticed.
• Names are matched, not identities. Without an LEI, registration number or domain, two firms with the same name can be confused; the confidence score shows how the match was made.
• The ECB list is a statistical list of monetary financial institutions; it is the EU-wide public list of credit institutions, but a national banking register is authoritative.

Sources and licences

• ESMA, Register of investment firms (MiFID II) and interim MiCA register: reproduction authorised, source acknowledged.
• European Banking Authority, Register of payment and electronic money institutions: reproduction authorised, source acknowledged.
• European Central Bank, list of monetary financial institutions: reproduction permitted, source acknowledged.
• AMF (France), listes noires and liste blanche des PSAN, via data.gouv.fr: Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0.
• FSMA (Belgium), list of companies operating unlawfully in Belgium: CC BY 4.0.
• Autoriteit Financiële Markten (AFM), waarschuwingslijst: reuse with explicit attribution to the AFM.
• European Commission, EU Financial Sanctions Files: reuse authorised, source acknowledged.
• GLEIF LEI records (LEI look-up): CC0.

Every result carries the attribution lines for the sources it used.