Trading names: why the company on the register is not the name on the site
The register holds 2,433 trading names against 2,650 businesses, and 1,162 accounts trade under at least one name that is not their legal name. The brand you know is usually a trading name; the licensee is a company with a different one.
Separating them is normal commercial practice and the register reflects it rather than resisting it. One licensed company can operate several brands, retire one and launch another, without any change to the permission underneath — which is precisely why the licence is held by the company and not by the brand.
534 trading names are marked Inactive: brands that were declared and are no longer used. Those records stay for the same reason inactive domains do.
That is also the expensive part. Searching the register by brand and finding nothing gets read as 'not licensed'. It much more often means the brand is a trading name and the search needed to start from the domain.
What to do with it. Start from the domain, get the account number, and read the legal name from there. The brand is the last thing to search by and the first thing people try.
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More Licences
- The public register, and what it is evidence of
- Checking whether a betting site is licensed, without taking anybody's word
- What a register cannot tell you, and what people read into it anyway
- Active: what it does and does not guarantee
- Surrendered: the operator handed the licence back
- Revoked, and revoked for non-payment: two different endings