Fast automated FCA firm checks — free public-data aggregation for compliance

Compliance and risk teams at FCA-regulated firms and their counterparts globally—part of an estimated 150,000 regulated financial firms—spend disproportionate time stitching together public records, registries, sanctions lists and media reports to prove controls, often using manual processes or fragmented tools. That creates slow onboarding, missed signals and operational drag relative to a typical compliance tooling spend of roughly $30,000 per firm per year. You could build an API-first SaaS that continuously aggregates and normalises public-data sources, applies robust entity-resolution to create persistent firm profiles, and exposes productised checks and audit-grade evidence for onboarding and ongoing monitoring. A free public-data aggregation tier would lower friction and drive adoption, with paid modules for continuous monitoring, certified source connectors and workflow integrations. The timing is favorable: regulatory tightening, buyer preference for API-first integrations and a shift to data-driven compliance combine with a $4.5B addressable market and high market/revenue scores to create clear demand. To stand out you must prioritise provenance and entity-resolution accuracy to minimise false positives and regulator pushback, provide native APIs for easy integration, and treat the free tier as a scalable lead engine while monetising certified feeds and monitoring; competition is medium, so execution on data coverage, legal risk and sustained engineering investment will determine success. Strengths include low CAC potential and a large runway, but honest challenges are the heavy lift of high-quality coverage and achieving regulator acceptance of automated evidence.