How the Regulatory Activity Index works

No single number can capture a regulator. An authority can be fast but opaque, deliberate but deeply engaged, small but disproportionately active — and a flat score inevitably compresses those textures. We build the Index anyway, for the same reason maps are drawn flat: a well-made simplification is where good decisions start, not where they end. The Index tells you which authorities deserve a closer look. The closer look itself — how a specific licence type actually moves through a specific authority — is the multidimensional picture ComplyBridge Intelligence provides, built from real licensing work rather than public reporting.

The methodology behind the Index has been examined and stress-tested repeatedly, with contributions from practitioners in compliance and supervisory practice across multiple EU jurisdictions — people who have filed with, worked inside, or advised across these authorities, and who have disagreed with early versions of this methodology often enough to make the current one considerably better.

Four pillars, combined into a weighted composite:

Licensing throughput. How many new authorisations an authority actually grants, normalised for the size of its staff — derived primarily from official EU registers, which record every authorisation and its granting authority.

Supervisory intensity. The people and budget an authority deploys relative to the population of firms it supervises.

Market gravity. The scale of the authority's supervised market, adjusted for the size of the authority's domestic economy — so jurisdictions whose financial sectors punch far above their economic weight are recognised for it, rather than the pillar restating GDP rankings.

Transparency and engagement. How open the authority is to the market it regulates: whether it publishes statistics on its own performance, whether its application process is documented with concrete timelines, whether applications can be made in English, and whether it maintains verified, structured industry engagement — operational sandboxes, innovation hubs with published output, named pre-application processes, and regular industry programmes — rather than a contact form.

Every metric is normalised against a peer group of European authorities, so each score expresses relative position, not an absolute grade. Because authorities count their supervised populations under very different conventions — a market-wide supervisor counts thousands of firms and intermediaries where a prudential central bank counts only credit institutions — comparisons are made within scope-consistent peer groups before entering the composite, so no authority is advantaged or penalised by its counting tradition. Where a pillar structurally does not apply to an authority's mandate, the remaining pillars are re-weighted; where an authority does not publish an input, it is treated neutrally rather than punitively. Engagement and transparency components are graded only on what can be verified in the authority's own publications. Pillar results combine into a composite expressed on a scaled index in which the leading authority anchors near 100.

The precise metric definitions, weightings, and scaling parameters are proprietary to ComplyBridge.

Tier labels characterise relative activity within the peer group rather than grading quality. Prolific authorities process high volumes at pace across broad markets. Active authorities maintain steady supervisory and licensing engagement. Measured authorities operate at a more deliberate pace, often reflecting deeper case-by-case scrutiny or an integrated mandate in which financial supervision is one function among several. Selective authorities concentrate on smaller or more specialised markets and engage the licensing pipeline accordingly.

It is not a ranking of regulatory quality, a judgment on any authority, legal advice, or a recommendation of where to seek authorisation. A Measured or Selective authority may be precisely the right regulator for a particular firm — and the practitioners who contributed to this methodology would be the first to say so.

EU-level authorities (the ECB, ESMA, EBA, EIOPA, and AMLA) do not operate national-style licensing pipelines and are shown with a mandate badge instead of an Index value. The same applies to authorities whose mandate is AML supervision rather than licensing. A small number of national authorities remain unscored where published data is not yet sufficient; they are marked accordingly rather than estimated.

Public inputs are drawn from official EU registers, each authority's most recent annual report, and the authorities' own published statistics — read in the original language where no translation exists. Register-based inputs refresh quarterly; annual-report inputs refresh as each authority publishes. Reporting bases inevitably differ across authorities — staffing figures for integrated central banks include functions beyond supervision, and supervised-population definitions vary — and scores are refined as authorities publish more granular data. The Index is indicative, and deliberately so.

The Index uses only publicly available data. It is entirely separate from ComplyBridge Intelligence — the licensing intelligence layer built from real filings, where every figure is published with its sample size and observation window.