Verifiable entity proof

This page is unusual for a company website: it is a method for assessing companies like ours, written by one of them. It exists because the licensing advisory market has a verification problem that its customers pay for.

Why this matters more here than elsewhere

Consider what an engagement actually asks of you. You send corporate documents, beneficial-ownership details, passports, financial information and a significant budget — usually to a firm you have never met in person, in a jurisdiction you may have no connection to, for a service whose outcome depends on a third party neither of you controls. The information asymmetry is severe, and the market has attracted people who exploit it.

Meanwhile the industry's own marketing has trained buyers badly. Sites in this sector routinely display jurisdiction counts, client logos, named testimonials, team photographs and success rates, and a striking proportion of it is unverifiable. When everything looks equally impressive, the impressive things stop carrying information.

The single most useful question

Ask for the legal name and the company number of the entity that will issue your invoice. Then check it yourself. Most major registers are free and take under a minute.

Three specific checks are worth running against what the register returns. Does the name match exactly, or is it similar enough to be mistaken for a better-known company? Is the status active rather than dissolved, struck off or in liquidation? And does the incorporation date support the experience being claimed — a company incorporated last year cannot itself have a decade of operating history, whatever its team's individual experience may be.

What does a company number actually prove?

Registration proves existence. It says nothing about competence, capacity or track record, and it is not difficult or expensive to obtain in most jurisdictions. Treat it as a floor rather than an endorsement: a firm that fails this test is disqualified, and a firm that passes it has told you only that it is real.

The claims that cannot be verified at all deserve to be held to a different standard. Headcount, office locations, years of experience, jurisdiction counts, project values — these are assertions. They may well be true. They should simply carry the weight of an assertion rather than the weight of a fact, and an adviser who leans on them heavily is choosing to compete on the unverifiable part of the picture.

Named individual testimonials deserve particular scepticism. A quotation attributed to a named person at a named company is the easiest thing on the internet to fabricate, and in this industry it is fabricated routinely. If a name matters to your decision, ask to be introduced. A firm with a genuine reference relationship can usually arrange that; a fabricated one cannot.

What are the warning signs?

The box above lists the three claims that should end a conversation, and they share a structure: each asserts something about a regulator's future decision. No adviser controls that. Regulators retain full discretion over whether to approve an application and over how long they take, which means a guaranteed outcome, a guaranteed date and a published success rate are all statements about the unknowable.

Two quieter signals are worth adding. First, an adviser who has never told you a route is unsuitable is not exercising judgement on your behalf. Second, a firm whose published claims contradict a source it points you to — an address that does not match the register it cites, a jurisdiction list that varies between pages — has a fact-checking problem, and your file will be subject to the same process.

A third is more subtle and worth learning to spot: claims that are precise about the wrong thing. A firm that publishes an exact jurisdiction count, an exact number of licence types and an exact success percentage, while being vague about which legal entity you are contracting with, has chosen precision where it is unverifiable and vagueness where it is not. The direction of that choice is the information.

How does this connect to your own file?

The same exercise is run on you, twice over. A regulator assessing an application traces ownership to natural persons, checks the entities in your structure against their registers, and compares what you say about yourself against what those registers return. A bank does it again during onboarding, and repeats it periodically afterwards. In both cases an unexplained intermediate holding company, a dormant entity nobody has struck off, or a director whose appointment was never filed becomes a question you have to answer at the worst possible moment.

Which means the practical advice runs in both directions. Before you engage an adviser, check theirs. Before you apply for anything, clean up yours: resolve the ownership chain, close what is dormant, make sure filings are current, and be able to produce the register entry for every entity in the structure without a search. It is unglamorous work, it costs almost nothing, and it removes an entire category of avoidable delay from every application and account opening that follows. The standards behind those checks derive from the FATF recommendations on beneficial ownership transparency, which is why they look so similar from one jurisdiction to the next.

Apply this to us

It would be incoherent to publish this and be exempt from it. CryptoLicense is the trading name of CL GLOBAL SDN BHD, registration 1421939-T, in Malaysia — the entity that contracts with you. The group also holds CRYPTO LICENCE LTD in the United Kingdom, number 16303114, incorporated 10 March 2025 and shown as Active at Companies House; and Elmbridge Advisory Limited in Hong Kong, number 78559566, registered 1 August 2025 with the Companies Registry.

Three deliberate choices in how that is written. We publish the numbers and the registers rather than addresses, because an address copied from an internal document and contradicted by the register would fail the exact check we are inviting. We say group entities rather than offices, because there is no evidence of staffed premises and the words are not interchangeable. And we state plainly that both overseas entities were registered in 2025 and are young — the 10+ years we publish is the team's experience, not any company's age. The full picture is on about us.

What we do not publish: an approval rate, a typical timeline, a fee table, a headcount, or a named client testimonial we cannot support. Some of those would help us commercially. All of them would fail the test this page sets.

The same standard applies in reverse, incidentally. Banks and regulators run this exercise on you during onboarding, which is why clean, checkable corporate information is worth building before anyone asks — a point developed on banking and card issuing.

Nothing on this page is legal advice, and no approval can be guaranteed by anyone, ourselves included. CryptoLicense is an advisory firm, not a regulator and not a law firm.

Registration proves a company exists. It proves nothing whatever about whether it can do the work.

CL Global advisory team

Related reading

How we workWhat we actually take responsibility forDoing it yourself vs using an adviserWhether you need an adviser at allAbout CryptoLicenseOur own entities and their public company numbers