Diligence · The walk
Verify any adviser. Including us.
Websites are written by their owners. Registers are written by regulators, and they disagree with websites more often than this industry admits. What follows is the two-minute walk we recommend a principal run on any firm that approaches them, ours included, with our own numbers listed first so the exercise can start here.
01 · Why the register wins
Two minutes
A register cannot be impressed. That is its entire value.
Every firm that approaches you controls its own website, its deck, its award citations and its logo wall. It does not control the public registers, which record what a state actually knows: whether the entity exists, who stands behind it, what it is licensed to do, and sometimes what has gone wrong. The walk takes two minutes per firm, costs nothing, and ends more bad conversations early than any amount of instinct.
The discipline has one rule: match the claim to the register that governs it. A firm's words choose its examiner. Say fund management, and a financial regulator's register decides. Say a financial centre's name, and that centre's own register decides. Say established and trusted, and the incorporation record decides how long trust has had to accumulate. What follows is the map.
02 · The registers
Matched to the claim
Six questions, six places the answer already sits.
- Does the company exist, and since when?
The incorporation registry of its claimed home: Companies House for a UK entity, the corporate registry of the relevant emirate or free zone in the UAE, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in India. Age, filings, officers and registered address, none of it editable by marketing.
- May it lawfully do what its words imply?
Words like fund management, arranging, placement and wealth advisory choose a financial regulator. In the UK that is the FCA register. If the firm's language is regulated and its name is absent from the register that governs it, the conversation has produced its finding.
- Is the financial-centre claim real?
The Gulf's financial centres publish their own public registers of registered entities, and their regulators publish registers of authorised firms. A firm that borrows a centre's prestige can be checked against that centre's own list in under a minute.
- Who is actually behind it?
Officer and ownership filings at the incorporation registry, read against the people in the room. A principal who cannot be found standing behind the entity that is asking for your trust is a question, whatever the answer turns out to be.
- For Indian delivery: is the counterparty in good standing?
The state delivery regulators publish project registrations, agent registrations, lapses, complaints and recovery actions. The register's account of a developer or intermediary is a record. The deck's account is a document.
- Does the money story hold?
Domain age and mail routing take one lookup. An adviser to significant capital writing from a free mailbox, or from a domain registered last quarter, has told you something no reference call will contradict.
03 · Run it on us
Our numbers, first
Here is our file. Start the walk here.
Bayswater Transflow Engineering Ltd, company number 16277213, registered in England and Wales at 128 City Road, London. The filings are public at Companies House, and reading them is the first thing we would do in your position. You will find a young company and one named principal. We would rather you learn that from the register than wonder why a brochure never mentioned it.
You will not find us on the FCA register, and that absence is the claim working correctly: this firm does not arrange investments, manage funds, or perform any activity that register governs, and it says so in writing wherever it describes itself. Our correspondence runs on our own domain, which resolves to this site. Our principal is named on every page, with a public profile one click away. The rest of what a questionnaire asks is answered on the counterparty file, in advance.
04 · The tells
What absence sounds like
The loudest signal is the sentence that should be there and is not.
Regulated words, and no regulator named anywhere on the site. The claim chose its examiner and then hid from it.
An award as the headline credential, from a publication whose business is selling awards.
A logo wall standing in for a client list. Procurement once is not a relationship, and the logos' owners rarely know they are on it.
Assured exits, guaranteed returns, buyback promises. In this corridor that is not just salesmanship; for a non-resident it describes something the rules do not permit.
Two minutes, six lookups, no permission needed. Any counterparty worth your capital will respect you more for having done it.
Enquiries
The practice answers.
128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX
The development practice is led by Tanishq Chauhan. Correspondence reaches the principal directly.
Tanishq Chauhan on LinkedIn, opens in a new tab
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