How to Use the FCA Register to Check an Adviser

If you're being advised about your pension — a transfer, a switch into a new scheme, an unfamiliar investment, or simply a recommendation to move your money somewhere else — one of the simplest and most powerful checks you can make takes about five minutes and costs nothing at all: searching the FCA (the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK's financial regulator) register. This free, public record lists every firm and every individual authorised to carry out regulated financial activities in the UK, including pension advice, and it is the first place anyone should look before acting on advice about their retirement savings. Our companion page on checking an adviser is legitimate covers the wider picture of verification; this guide focuses specifically on getting the register itself right, including one mistake that catches out even careful, sensible people: trusting the wrong contact details for a genuine firm.

What the FCA register actually is

The Financial Services Register — usually just called "the FCA register" — is the official public record of every firm and individual authorised by the FCA to carry out regulated financial activities in the UK, including giving pension advice, arranging pension transfers, and managing investments. It's maintained directly by the regulator, updated regularly, and free for anyone to search, with no login, account, or payment required. You can look up a firm by name, an individual adviser by name, or by their FCA reference number (sometimes shortened to "FRN"), which is a unique identifying number every authorised firm and individual is given. The register doesn't just confirm that someone exists on paper — it shows their current authorisation status, the specific regulated activities they're permitted to carry out (called their "permissions"), any trading names they operate under, and in some cases a history of past regulatory issues. It's genuinely one of the most useful consumer protection tools available, and it's significantly underused simply because most people don't know it exists or don't realise how quickly it can be checked.

Why checking the register matters before anything else

Giving regulated pension advice without FCA authorisation is illegal in the UK. That single fact is what makes the register so valuable: if a firm or individual isn't listed as authorised for the specific activity they're carrying out, they are not legally permitted to be advising you on your pension, full stop. Beyond the legal point, authorisation carries real practical protections. Advice from an authorised firm is generally covered by the Financial Ombudsman Service if something goes wrong with the advice itself, and in many cases by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) if the firm fails financially. Advice or arrangements involving an unauthorised firm typically carry none of these protections — if the money is lost, there is usually no route to get it back. A genuine, regulated adviser expects to be checked and will never discourage you from doing it; treat any reluctance, irritation, or attempt to rush you past this step as a warning sign in its own right, not a minor inconvenience to smooth over.

How to search the register step by step

The process itself is straightforward, but the order and care with which you do it matters just as much as doing it at all. Follow these steps every time, even if the firm seems well known or has been recommended by someone you trust.

• 1

  Go directly to the register yourself, by typing register.fca.org.uk into your browser's address bar. Never click through a link, QR code, or phone number given to you by the person or firm you are trying to check — go there independently, every time.

• 2

  Use the search function to look up the firm's name, the individual adviser's name, or their FCA reference number if you have been given one. Searching by reference number is the most precise method, since firm names can be similar or easily confused.

• 3

  Open the firm's or individual's full profile and check the status shown clearly at the top of the page. You are looking for "Authorised" and a status that is current, not historic.

• 4

  Look at the permissions section of the profile to see exactly what regulated activities they are approved to carry out. For anything involving a pension transfer, look specifically for permissions covering pension transfer advice, not just general investment or insurance mediation — a firm can be genuinely authorised for one activity while having no permission at all to advise on pension transfers.

• 5

  Check the contact details listed on the register profile itself, including any registered address and phone number. These are the details the FCA holds on file, independently of anything the firm has told you directly.

• 6

  Call the phone number shown on the register — not any number given to you directly by the person or firm you're checking — to independently confirm you are speaking to the genuine, authorised business. This single step defeats most clone-firm attempts, covered in more detail below.

• 7

  If anything doesn't match — a different trading name, a status that says "no longer authorised" or "revoked", missing permissions for the activity being offered, or a firm you simply cannot find at all — stop. Do not sign anything, transfer anything, or provide further personal information until the discrepancy is resolved.

Reading the results: what "authorised" actually means

Authorisation isn't a permanent badge awarded once and forgotten. The FCA continually supervises authorised firms and individuals, and it can restrict, suspend, or fully withdraw authorisation if standards slip or serious problems emerge. That means the register reflects a firm's status right now, at the moment you check it — not whatever status it may have held last year, or even last month. A firm that was perfectly legitimate two years ago could have had its authorisation withdrawn since, and a firm you've never heard of could be entirely legitimate today. This is exactly why the check has to happen close to the time of any decision, not relied on from memory or from something you were told previously. The table below sets out the statuses you're most likely to encounter and what each one means in practice.

The clone-firm warning

One of the most convincing tricks used by pension scammers is impersonating a genuine, fully authorised firm — sometimes called a "clone firm" scam. Here, a scammer contacts you using the real name, the real FCA reference number, and even genuine-looking documents belonging to an actual authorised firm, while having no real connection to that business at all. Because the details they quote are technically accurate and do appear correctly on the register, simply looking the firm up and seeing "Authorised" can feel like enough reassurance — but it isn't, on its own. The critical extra step is this: always find the real firm's contact details independently, directly from the register itself, and then call that number yourself, rather than trusting any phone number, email address, or link given to you by the person who first contacted you. A genuine firm's real switchboard will have no record of the conversation you think you've been having; a clone-firm scammer, on the other hand, will often try to keep you on their own number throughout, sometimes even answering calls to "confirm" details in a way designed to sound reassuring. If you can't get through to the firm using only details found independently on the register, treat that as a red flag rather than a technical hiccup.

What to do if a firm or person isn't listed, or something looks wrong

If a search on the register comes back empty, shows a status other than "Authorised", or the permissions don't cover what's being proposed, the right response is simple: do not proceed. Don't sign paperwork, don't transfer any money, and don't hand over further personal or financial details while the situation is unresolved. It's worth reporting what you've found — the FCA has a consumer helpline specifically for this purpose, and reporting an unauthorised firm or a suspected clone can help stop the same approach being used on someone else. If you believe you're already dealing with a scam, or have already transferred money, Action Fraud is the right place to report it, and it's worth doing this promptly rather than waiting to be completely certain. It's also worth checking the FCA's own ScamSmart warning list, which specifically names firms and individuals the FCA has flagged as operating without authorisation or targeting UK consumers — a name appearing there is unambiguous, and worth checking alongside the main register rather than instead of it.

The register isn't a total guarantee — but its absence nearly always is a red flag

It's worth being realistic about what the register can and can't do for you. Being authorised means a firm or individual has met the FCA's standards to operate and remains under its supervision — it doesn't mean every recommendation they ever make will turn out to be the right one for you personally, or that ordinary caution stops being useful. Fees should still be explained clearly, recommendations should still be justified in plain terms, and it's still entirely reasonable to want a second opinion or some time to think, even with a fully authorised adviser. What the register check does very reliably is rule out the worst-case scenario: dealing with someone who has no legal standing to advise you on your pension at all. Put simply, appearing correctly on the register doesn't remove all risk, but not appearing on it — or appearing with a status other than "Authorised" for the activity in question — is about as close to a guaranteed red flag as this section of the site gets. If in doubt, always check, and always check again independently rather than relying on anything given to you directly.

A quick example: putting the check into practice

Say you've been contacted out of the blue by a firm calling itself "Everly Wealth Partners" about transferring your defined contribution pension into a new overseas investment opportunity that promises unusually strong growth. Rather than agreeing to anything on the call, you close it down politely, then independently type register.fca.org.uk into your browser and search for the firm's name yourself. The profile that comes up does exist, and does show a status of "Authorised" — but the list of permissions does not include pension transfer advice specifically, only a narrower general insurance mediation permission, and the registered address shown is in a different country to the one the caller mentioned. Individually, each of those details might have an innocent explanation. Together, they're a mismatch between what you were told and what's actually on record, and that mismatch alone is reason enough to stop, ask direct follow-up questions, and seriously consider walking away rather than trying to explain it away yourself. This is exactly the kind of everyday inconsistency the register check is designed to catch — not always a dramatic, obviously fraudulent approach, but a quiet gap between the story and the paperwork that's easy to miss if you don't look.

Keeping a simple record of what you checked

It's worth keeping a basic written record of what you found when you searched the register — the date you checked, the FCA reference number you searched for, the status and permissions shown, and ideally a screenshot of the profile page itself. This takes moments at the time, but it becomes genuinely useful if a dispute arises later, if you want a family member, solicitor, or another adviser to sanity-check your decision, or if you ever need to report a firm to the FCA or to Action Fraud. It also protects you against the awkward possibility of a firm's status changing between the moment you check and the moment you actually act on advice — pension transfers are rarely completed in a single sitting, and weeks can pass between a first conversation and a signed instruction. If there's ever a query later about what you knew and when you knew it, a dated record settles the question immediately, rather than relying on memory or on whatever the firm itself later claims was said.

Checking the register only takes a few minutes, but it's worth building into your routine for any pension decision that involves an adviser, a transfer, or a new scheme — not just the first time you're approached, but every time money is due to move. Combine it with the practical questions covered in our guide on questions to ask before transferring your pension, and you'll have covered the two checks that catch the overwhelming majority of pension scams before any money changes hands.