When most people think about UK data sources to scrape, they go straight to Companies House. And they should — it's an excellent dataset. But there's a more valuable register that compliance teams, fintech sales teams, and KYC workflows desperately need, and it has zero scrapers on the Apify marketplace: the FCA Financial Services Register.
The Financial Conduct Authority maintains a live register of every firm authorised to provide financial services in the UK — ~50,000 firms ranging from Barclays Bank to a one-person IFA. It includes their regulated permissions (what they're actually allowed to do), their principal address, trading names, and enforcement history. It's the data source used to verify "is this firm actually regulated?" — a check every fintech, insurance company, and compliance team runs regularly.
The opportunity
The FCA register has a free official REST API at register.fca.org.uk/Developer. No paid tier, no scraping needed — just register an account, get a key, and start making authenticated requests. Despite this, there was literally no Apify actor for it. The US equivalent — FINRA BrokerCheck — already has two actors with thousands of users. The UK gap was sitting there, unoccupied.
