How the ComplyBridge Regulatory Activity Index works.

The Index is a composite of four pillars:

Licensing throughput. How many new authorisations an authority actually grants, normalised for the size of its staff. Derived primarily from official EU registers (including the ESMA MiCA register and the EBA registers established under PSD2), which record every authorisation and its granting authority.

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

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

Transparency & engagement. How open the authority is to the market it regulates: whether it publishes service-level statistics on its own performance, whether applications can be made in English, and whether it maintains structured industry engagement — innovation hubs, workshops, and regular dialogue with supervised firms and applicants.

Each underlying metric is normalised against the peer group of European national supervisory authorities, so every score expresses relative position rather than an absolute grade. Pillar results are combined into a weighted composite and expressed on a scaled index in which the leading authority anchors near 100.

Where a pillar structurally does not apply to an authority — for example, MiCA licensing for authorities outside the EU framework — the remaining pillars are re-weighted, so no authority is penalised for the shape of its mandate. Where an individual input is not published by an authority, it is treated neutrally against the peer group rather than as a zero, and the affected score is flagged as provisional.

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

Tier labels characterise relative activity levels within the peer group rather than grading quality. Prolific authorities process high volumes at pace across a broad market. Active authorities maintain broad, 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.

The ECB, ESMA, EBA and EIOPA do not operate national-style authorisation pipelines: they set technical standards, coordinate supervision, and (in the ECB's case) directly supervise significant credit institutions through joint teams with national authorities. Scoring them on the same axes as national regulators would be misleading, so they are shown with an EU-level mandate badge instead of an Index value.

Public inputs are drawn from official EU registers, each authority's most recent published annual report, published national statistics, and standard international economic datasets. Register-based inputs are refreshed quarterly; annual-report inputs are refreshed each year as reports are published. Last updated: July 2026.

The Activity Index uses only publicly available data. It is entirely separate from ComplyBridge Intelligence — the licensing intelligence layer (approval times, success rates, responsiveness, rejection reasons) compiled from real licensing work run through the ComplyBridge platform, available to customers.

The Index is indicative. Not every authority reports every input: supervised-entity counts follow each authority's own definitions, staff figures for authorities that are also central banks include non-supervisory functions, and some categories are only partially reported across the peer group. ComplyBridge harmonises these inputs where public data permits, treats genuine gaps neutrally rather than punitively, and flags affected scores as provisional; scores are refined as authorities publish more granular data. The Index is a descriptive measure of regulatory activity. It is not a ranking of regulatory quality, a judgment on any authority, legal advice, or a recommendation of where to seek authorisation.