FSRA in-principle approvals hit 120 in 2025, up 32%: the firms already live under that pipeline

The Financial Services Regulatory Authority issued 120 In-Principle Approvals (IPAs) in 2025, up 32% on the year before, according to the FSRA Annual Report 2025. The regulator also granted 95 full Financial Services Permissions (FSPs), up 22%, and approved 11 FSP variations for firms expanding their licensed activities. By the end of 2025, ADGM had 346 FSP holders on its books.

An In-Principle Approval isn’t a licence to operate. It’s the FSRA’s conditional green light, the stage where a firm has cleared the substance of its application and has a defined runway to finish the rest, before it converts into a full Financial Services Permission. 120 of those conditional green lights went out in 2025 alone. UAE Fintech Vibes has already covered several of the firms that walked through that exact pipeline this year, from wealth managers to crypto infrastructure to a bank built from scratch inside ADGM.

What the FSRA Annual Report 2025 says drove the growth

The report’s own breakdown of the numbers points to a specific pattern: growth wasn’t evenly spread. Advisory and wealth management activity accounted for the strongest sector growth in 2025, with technology-enabled and advisory-led business models featuring prominently across new authorisations. The report also notes a growing share of applications involving more complex group, ownership, and cross-border structures, and that the authorisation pipeline continued to outpace prior years throughout 2025.

Who’s moving through the pipeline

None of the following firms is named in the FSRA’s report, which only publishes the aggregate numbers. But four recent ADGM approvals show what that pipeline looks like up close, and together they align with almost every pattern the report describes.

Julius Baer is the cleanest match for what the FSRA’s report calls its strongest growth area. A Swiss private bank securing a dedicated wealth advisory office for ADGM’s ultra-high-net-worth and family office clients is precisely the ‘advisory and wealth management activity’ the report credits with driving 2025’s authorisation growth.

Bitcoin Suisse shows the two-stage pipeline in a single company. It picked up its IPA in May 2025, then didn’t convert that into a full FSP for BTCS (Middle East) Ltd. until July 2026, over 13 months later. That gap is the part an aggregate number like “120 IPAs” hides: an IPA is a milestone, not a finish line, and firms sit inside that conditional stage for well over a year before they’re actually licensed to operate.

Finance House’s Dhabi Bank is the more unusual case. Most of the FSRA’s 2025 authorisation activity was firms adding an ADGM entity to an existing global or regional business. Dhabi Bank was built from the ground up as a new institution within ADGM, which is a different kind of bet on the free zone than a Julius Baer or a Circle expanding an existing footprint.

Why it matters

For ADGM as a financial centre

An aggregate stat like ‘120 IPAs, up 32% is easy to read as a generic growth headline. What the individual cases show is that the growth is concentrated and specific: private wealth managers, crypto infrastructure firms, and now a ground-up digital bank are the profile of applicants actually moving through ADGM’s pipeline in 2025, not a random cross-section of financial services. That matches the report’s own framing of ADGM’s market as diversifying and maturing rather than just growing in raw headcount.

For firms considering an ADGM application

The Bitcoin Suisse timeline is the practical takeaway for any firm weighing an ADGM application: budget for the IPA-to-FSP gap to run over a year, not a few months, especially for a crypto or digital asset business where the FSRA’s supervisory scrutiny is heaviest. An IPA is real progress worth announcing, but it’s not the point where a firm can tell clients it’s licensed to operate.

The bottom line

An annual report stat like ‘120 IPAs’ reads like noise until you can put faces on it. We’ve been covering the individual approvals as they land all year without necessarily clocking that they’re all data points inside the same FSRA pipeline, which the regulator just summarised in one line. The Bitcoin Suisse timeline is the one worth remembering next time a company announces an ADGM in-principle approval and frames it as a launch. It isn’t one yet.

Editor’s take: The IPA number in the FSRA Annual Report 2025 is a pipeline snapshot, not a final list of new market entrants. Some of 2025’s 120 approvals will still be sitting at the IPA stage well into 2026 and 2027, the way Bitcoin Suisse did. Worth watching which of this year’s IPA recipients convert to full FSPs next, and whether the advisory and wealth management concentration the FSRA flagged continues or gives way to a different sector as ADGM’s market matures further.

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