The deadline has passed. The register is live. And most platforms are still scrambling.
The European Crowdfunding Service Providers Regulation (ECSPR) has been fully operative since November 2022. The authorisation deadline passed in November 2023. ESMA’s technical standards are in place. The supervisory register is live and public.
So why are so many crowdfunding platforms still not fully compliant?
According to EUROCROWD’s 2025 compliance review, the average compliance score across assessed platforms was just 5 out of 10. Nearly 40% failed to meet even the baseline expectations around transparency and investor disclosure. Only three platforms were rated Excellent.
The Promise and the Reality
ECSPR was designed to replace a fragmented patchwork of national rules with a single EU-wide framework: one authorisation, one passport, one set of investor protections. ESMA maintains a public register of every authorised crowdfunding service provider across all 27 Member States.
In practice, the roll-out has been uneven. Fewer than 30% of licensed platforms were operating cross-border as of early 2025, the regulation’s single most important commercial promise. Dozens of platforms were left in regulatory limbo after missing the November 2023 authorisation deadline. In Germany, one of the EU’s largest economies, an ECSPR-licensed platform filed for insolvency in mid-2025 and multiple licences have since been voluntarily returned.
The platforms that are struggling share a common pattern: they treated ECSPR as a licensing event, not an ongoing operational commitment. Getting authorised was the goal. Staying compliant was an afterthought.
The Entity Identity Gap
One of the most overlooked compliance gaps sits at the foundation of the regulation: accurate, consistent identification of every legal entity involved in a crowdfunding transaction.
ECSPR requires platforms to publish a Key Investment Information Sheet (KIIS) for every offer, identify project owners clearly within it, and maintain data integrity in the ESMA register. For legal entities, the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) is the internationally recognised standard for doing this, codified in ISO 17442 and backed by GLEIF’s open global database.
A platform that publishes a KIIS without the project owner’s LEI is operating with a visible gap in its investor protection framework. A platform without its own active LEI risks data integrity failures in the ESMA register itself.
The same applies to institutional investors participating in cross-border raises. Platforms with robust KYB workflows will require it. Those that do not are carrying AML exposure they may not have fully mapped.
AML Is Coming Too
The compliance picture is about to get more demanding. The EU’s new AML framework, set to apply from July 2027, will formally designate all licensed crowdfunding platforms as obliged entities. That means comprehensive AML and counter-terrorist financing obligations: customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting.
Platforms that have not yet built LEI-based entity identification into their onboarding and monitoring workflows will find themselves building from scratch under regulatory pressure. The platforms that start now will be significantly better positioned.
Three Things to Do This Quarter
If you are a compliance officer at a crowdfunding service provider, project owner, or institutional investor active on ECSPR-regulated platforms, these are the most immediate actions:
- Check your platform’s LEI status. If it has lapsed or was never registered, fix that first. It is the identifier through which you appear in ESMA’s register.
- Make LEI a gatekeeping requirement for project owners. Before any KIIS goes live, the project owner’s LEI should be verified as active. No LEI, no listing.
- Start your AML readiness assessment. Map your current due diligence procedures against the 2027 AMLA obligations and identify where LEI-anchored entity identification can reduce manual burden.
RapidLEI is a GLEIF-accredited LEI issuer and the largest LEI issuer globally. Whether you need a single LEI or volume management across a portfolio of project owners, we have a solution that fits. Register or renew your LEI, explore EnterpriseLEI for platforms managing clients at scale, or speak to our compliance team if you are not sure where to start.
