Methodology

Company and regulatory data last checked against the registers 12 Oct 2026.

This page explains exactly how a firm ends up in the Placement Scout database, how it's classified, what its data means, and what we already know is imperfect about it. The goal is that you could reconstruct the logic below without ever seeing the code.

Where the data comes from

Every firm starts as a hit in a Companies House advanced search, scoped to a fixed list of UK SIC 2007 codes (below). Its regulatory status and website are then looked up against the FCA’s Financial Services Register by matching the company name. Most firms are not on that register, so for those a website is guessed from the company name and kept only if the page itself names the company; a guess that cannot be confirmed is discarded. The firm’s own website is then checked for a careers page, hiring-related language, and a public contact address. Nothing here is invented — every fact traces back to one of these three public sources.

How a firm qualifies as “boutique”

There is no official legal definition of “boutique” — we infer it from what size of statutory accounts a company files with Companies House, which is a genuine but imperfect proxy:

Public limited companies are excluded outright — they’re categorically not independent boutiques.
A firm filing full, group, dormant, or audit-exemption-subsidiary accounts is excluded — full/group accounts usually mean a larger or non-independent operation, dormant means not currently trading, and an audit-exemption subsidiary is, by definition, part of a group rather than independent.
A firm filing micro-entity, small, medium, abridged, or total-exemption accounts qualifies — this is the accounts profile of a genuinely small, independent company.
A firm with no accounts on file yet (common for very recently incorporated companies) is kept by default rather than excluded, since there’s nothing yet to disqualify it on.

This is a heuristic, not a certainty. A large firm that happens to file simplified accounts, or a genuinely tiny boutique with an unusual filing history, can occasionally fall on the wrong side of this test.

Sector classification

Sectors are assigned from the SIC codes a company has registered with Companies House. A firm can appear in more than one sector if its registered codes span more than one category below.

M&A / advisory — SIC 70221, 66190, 64999
Asset & wealth management — SIC 66300, 64301, 64302, 64304
PE / VC — SIC 64303
Quant / trading / fintech — SIC 64991, 66120, 66110

London and regional classification

A firm counts as London-based if Companies House lists its registered office locality as “London”, or its postcode falls in a core London postcode area (E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W, WC). A registered office isn’t always the same place a firm actually hires from — a firm registered elsewhere can genuinely operate and hire in London, or the reverse.

What raises a firm’s priority

Firms are ranked, not just filtered — a handful of signals push a firm higher: being based in London, having hiring-relevant language on its own careers page (placement, internship, or graduate-scheme wording), having a genuine discoverable contact channel, and being a newer company more likely to be actively building a team. We don’t publish the exact weighting — the point is what kind of firm rises to the top, not a formula to reverse-engineer.

Hiring signals

Every firm’s careers page is checked periodically, and if the page’s content has genuinely changed since the last check, that’s recorded as a signal — a much better indicator that a firm is actively hiring than a static listing that might be months old. The database’s “Careers page updated” column shows the date of the most recent change within the last 30 days, where one exists.

This is a new capability — it can only detect a change, so a firm needs to be checked twice, with a real change in between, before it shows anything at all. Expect this column to be mostly blank at first and fill in gradually as more firms get their second check.

Known limitations

Search coverage — Companies House’s search API caps a single query at 5,000 results. In principle, a very dense incorporation-date window within the same SIC codes could exceed that cap and miss firms; this is a known open edge case, not yet fully resolved.
FCA matching — firms are matched to the FCA register by company name (normalised for legal suffixes and formatting), not a shared unique identifier. An unusual trading name or a recent rename can occasionally cause a missed or mismatched regulatory record.
“Boutique” is a heuristic — see above. It is not a legal or official designation.
Regulatory status can change after we last checked it. Always confirm anything that matters against the linked FCA or Companies House record directly, not just what’s shown here.
Not every field updates at the same pace — Companies House and FCA facts (registered address, incorporation date, regulatory status) are checked on the main refresh cycle above. A firm’s careers page and contact details are refreshed on their own slower cycle, only once that firm’s prior check is over 30 days old.

What’s deliberately excluded

Any individual’s named contact email. Only shared, role-based inboxes (careers@, info@, and similar) are ever shown — see the Outreach Playbook for how to find the right person yourself.
Firms that have asked to be removed, or that we’ve identified as misclassified (for example, a company-formation agent rather than a real trading boutique) — excluded permanently, regardless of what a later refresh would otherwise find.
Public limited companies and other non-independent company types — see the boutique test above.
Group subsidiaries, dormant companies, and companies filing full-scale statutory accounts — these generally indicate a larger or non-independent operation.