Compliance officer · in-house team

FCA verification for compliance officers

The problem

FCA Connect search is fine for ad-hoc lookups but doesn't fit a workflow that needs to verify a firm's status before every transaction. Compliance officers end up screenshotting the FCA Register page into the client file. Nothing about that is audit-trail-ready, and it doesn't catch a permission change that happened the day before.

How Stratum fits

The FCA Firm Verification endpoint returns the firm's authorisation status, permissions matrix, key individuals (CF/SMF holders), and most-recent register update in one JSON response. Live data — same source the FCA itself publishes. Audit-trail-ready: every response carries a list version + timestamp you can pin to the file. Pair with the FCA Warning List endpoint for clone-firm cross-checks. Sub-200ms p95 on cached firms; ~600ms on a cold pull.

One request

# Request
curl https://api.stratumapis.com/v1/fca/firms/122702 -H "x-stratum-key: $KEY"

# Response
{ "firmReferenceNumber": "122702", "name": "Lloyds Bank plc", "status": "Authorised", "permissions": [...], "keyIndividuals": [...], "listVersion": "2026-05-05" }

Set $KEY from your dashboard.

Frequently asked

How fresh is the data?

Live — every request hits the FCA Register API. We cache for 60 seconds to absorb burst patterns; pass `?fresh=1` to bypass.

Do you cover Appointed Representatives?

Yes. The response includes principals + ARs. Use `/v1/fca/firms/{frn}/ar-mapping` for the relationship graph.

How do you handle FCA Warning List clone firms?

The Warning List is a separate endpoint. We recommend running both on every transaction; the suite-letting-agent endpoint composes them.