Licensing Atlas: fintech licences, regulators and laws worldwide

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  Regulators

  43 central banks, securities commissions, FIUs and gaming authorities

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  Licences

  12 families and 229 concrete licences, compared by country

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  Activities

  46 regulated activities and the licence each needs

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  Laws

  44 laws with summaries and links to the official full texts

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  Countries

  36 jurisdictions on one map

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  Tools

  Pre-application meetings, sandboxes, fees and timelines, comparison, statistics

Coverage

Latest regulatory changes

• V.4 of the VARA Company Rulebook and Activity-based Rulebooks, effective 19 June 2025¹ n/a VARA
• 2027-10-25: UK's new FSMA regulatory regime for cryptoassets is scheduled to come into full force, after which only FSMA-authorised firms or firms protected by statutory saving provisions may provide regulated cryptoasset services in the UK.² n/a FCA
• 2027-04-09 (12 months after 2026-04-08 royal assent): the Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act 2026 commences, requiring operators of digital asset platforms and tokenised custody platforms to hold an ASIC Australian Financial Services Licence in addition to any AUSTRAC registration: an AUSTRAC-only registration will no longer be sufficient for custodial digital-asset businesses.³ n/a AUSTRAC
• 2026-10-14: EBA classified USDC, issued by Circle Internet Financial Europe SAS, as the first significant e-money token under MiCA (45 EMTs notified in the EU); from 2026-11-12 the EBA directly supervises its own funds, reserve of assets, liquidity and recovery and redemption plans, taking these over from the ACPR, which keeps governance, qualifying holdings and fit-and-proper supervision.⁴ n/a EBA
• 2026-10-05: FinCEN withdrew two pending crypto proposals: the recordkeeping, verification and reporting rule for convertible-virtual-currency transactions with unhosted wallets, and the section 311 special measure naming CVC mixing as a primary money-laundering concern.⁵ n/a FinCEN
• 2026-10-02: the CGA online gaming portal is offline; submissions meant for the portal cannot be sent by e-mail instead, portal filing deadlines are postponed until it is back, and existing licences and operators' obligations are unaffected.⁶ n/a CGA
• 2026-10-01: DFSA Notice of Amendments to Legislation (October 2026), following Consultation Papers No 172 and 174: PIB Rule-making Instrument No. 443 in force 2026-10-02; COB (No. 444), IFR (No. 445) and GLO (No. 446) instruments in force 2027-01-01.⁷ n/a DFSA
• 2026-09-30: FCA opened its cryptoasset authorisation gateway on Connect for Part 4A applications and variations of permission under the new FSMA cryptoasset regime; the application period closes 2027-02-28.⁸ n/a FCA
• 2026-09-23: ESAs (EBA, EIOPA, ESMA) issued Autumn 2026 joint risk update identifying ICT external third-party dependencies, cyber threats, and private credit as key structural vulnerabilities.⁹ n/a EBA
• 2026-09-18: EBA published its final Guidelines on the management of third-party risk, delivering a simplified and proportionate framework aligned with DORA focusing on critical or important functions (CIFs).¹⁰ n/a EBA

How the Atlas is built

Every fact on every page carries a numbered source: a regulator page, an official register, a legislation portal or EUR-Lex: and the date it was read. Specialists review the pages, and the data is re-checked on a schedule. Read the methodology, download the open dataset (CC BY 4.0), or report an error.