How I built an FCA Register scraper on Apify (and why it's the B2B data gap nobody talks about)
Daniel Ainsworth discusses the creation of an FCA Register scraper using Apify, highlighting the lack of existing scrapers for this valuable data source. The FCA Financial Services Register contains essential information about approximately 50,000 regulated firms in the UK. Ainsworth emphasizes the simplicity of accessing this data through the FCA's free API, which can significantly aid compliance and KYC processes.
- ▪The FCA Financial Services Register includes details on every firm authorized to provide financial services in the UK.
- ▪Ainsworth's scraper utilizes the FCA's free official REST API, which allows for easy data retrieval without the need for scraping.
- ▪The API provides various endpoints to access firm details, permissions, and historical names, making it a valuable tool for compliance teams.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/danielainsworth/how-i-built-an-fca-register-scraper-on-apify-and-why-its-the-b2b-data-gap-nobody-talks-about-3e7g |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 21:21:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T21:29:38.368Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T21:29:38.368Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Sl7HNMBqaoHB |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3954791) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Daniel Ainsworth Posted on May 28 How I built an FCA Register scraper on Apify (and why it's the B2B data gap nobody talks about) #fca #compliance #kyc #uk When most people think about UK data sources to scrape, they go straight to Companies House. And they should — it's an excellent dataset.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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