“Sign-off” means three different things, and buying the wrong one is expensive. Approval is a regulated act. Advice is a legal opinion. Review is an operational read of the finished asset. Only one of the three can make an unauthorised firm’s UK promotion lawful.
NorthPoint is our own service. We’ve included it and said so — judge the comparison accordingly. This page is published by NorthPoint Marketing Solutions Oy, and one of the options described below is ours. We have not ranked ourselves first, we do not claim to be “best”, and we state plainly what our own service does not do. Every statement about anyone else here is either sourced and dated, or describes a category rather than making a claim about a named firm. Our standing view on self-published rankings is on the record: when the agencies write their own rankings →
| Approval | Advice | Review | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who performs it | An FCA-authorised firm holding the approver permission | A law firm or qualified counsel | An in-house team, or an operator such as NorthPoint (us) |
| What you get | A lawful route for a specific promotion, plus a visible approval marker on the asset | A reasoned opinion on how the regime applies to your facts | A per-rule verdict on the finished asset, the triggered line quoted back, and a rewrite |
| Scope | UK financial promotions, within the approver’s own permitted asset classes | Whatever the engagement covers — regime, entity, product, market | The specific asset submitted, against a published rule set |
| Speed | Regulated process | Partner hours | Campaign speed |
| What it is not | Not a compliance guarantee, and not valid outside the approver’s permission | Not approval. An opinion does not make an unauthorised firm’s promotion lawful | Not approval and not legal advice. Information only |
Section 21 of FSMA is a criminal-liability perimeter: an unauthorised person must not communicate a financial promotion in or to the UK unless one of the lawful gateways applies. There are three — the communicator is itself FCA-authorised, the content is approved by an authorised person under the Section 21 approval regime and carries the visible approval marker, or a Financial Promotion Order exemption genuinely applies. If none applies, the only compliant route is to keep the promotion out of the UK effectively.
Two details do most of the damage in practice. First, since the February 2024 reform an approver can only approve asset classes within its own permission — a non-crypto approval has limited validity for a crypto promotion. Second, where a promotion is approved, the approval marker (approver name and FCA reference) must be visible on the asset itself; an approval you cannot see on the post or the landing page is, for enforcement purposes, not there. The way to check an approver is the FCA’s Financial Services Register, which shows the firm’s actual permissions.
Reach, not incorporation, decides whether you are inside the perimeter. The FCA’s February 2026 High Court action involving HTX, an offshore exchange whose promotions reached UK consumers, is the working example.
MiCA has no equivalent of the UK approval gateway. Responsibility for marketing communications sits with the offeror, the person seeking admission to trading, or the authorised crypto-asset service provider. There is no third-party approval step that moves the obligation off your balance sheet, which means an EU operator has to hold the review internally, or buy it as a service while keeping the responsibility.
The consequence of getting it wrong is set out in the regulation itself: administrative fines for the most serious infringements run up to €15 million or 12.5% of total annual turnover (Article 111). That is the number that makes a review budget look small. It is context, not a statement about your own exposure, which we cannot assess from a web page.
For scale on the other side of the ledger: Coinbound, a crypto marketing agency, states on its own site: “Most crypto public relations firms start between $15,000–$30,000+ per month.” Source: coinbound.io, page last updated 5 June 2026, read 29 July 2026.
You very likely arrived here looking for a list of crypto law firms. We have not published one, and we would rather explain why than pad the page. We cannot verify another firm’s crypto regulatory experience, staffing, turnaround, permissions or fees to a standard we would defend in public. A ranking of legal advisers built on unverifiable claims is a liability on a compliance domain, and it would be worse than useless to you: you would be choosing counsel on the strength of our guesses.
The verifiable route is better. Check the FCA’s Financial Services Register for what a firm is actually permitted to do — including whether it can approve financial promotions, and for which asset classes. Check the national bar or law-society directory for standing. Ask the seven questions on our services comparison. Then judge for yourself.
The same standard is why we told you at the top of this page that NorthPoint is our own service. If we are not willing to publish unverified claims about other people, we should not publish unlabelled claims about ourselves either.
Disclosure: this section is about our own service. NorthPoint sits in the third column of the table above. We read the finished asset against published MiCA, FCA and GDPR rule packs, quote the triggered line back to you, and give you a rewrite. We are not an FCA-authorised approver, we do not give legal advice, and we do not certify compliance — we say “checked”, never “compliant”.
Review is genuinely useful upstream of both of the other two: it is cheaper to fix a headline before counsel bills for reading it, and an approver has less to push back on when an asset already clears the obvious rules. It is not a substitute for either.
Under Section 21 of FSMA, an unauthorised firm cannot lawfully communicate a financial promotion unless the content is approved by an authorised person, or an exemption applies, or the communicator is itself FCA-authorised. Since the February 2024 reform an approver can only approve asset classes within its own permission, so a non-crypto approval has limited validity for a crypto promotion. Where a promotion is approved, the approval marker, meaning the approver name and FCA reference, must be visible on the asset itself. This is general information, not legal advice.
No. A legal opinion tells you how a regime applies to your facts and can be relied on internally and, depending on the arrangement, be privileged. Approval is a specific regulated act performed by an FCA-authorised firm holding the approver permission, and it attaches to a particular promotion. A firm can give you an excellent opinion and still not be able to approve your promotion. Many buyers conflate the two, and that difference is the whole point of this page.
No equivalent gateway exists under MiCA. Responsibility for marketing communications sits with the offeror, the person seeking admission to trading, or the authorised crypto-asset service provider, and there is no third-party approval step that transfers it. In practice an EU operator cannot outsource the obligation the way a UK unauthorised firm can route a promotion through an approver: it has to hold the review internally, or buy it as a service while keeping the responsibility.
Because we cannot verify another firm's crypto regulatory experience, staffing, turnaround, permissions or fees to a standard we would defend in public, and publishing an unverifiable ranking of legal advisers on a compliance domain would be a liability rather than a service. The verifiable route is better anyway: the FCA's Financial Services Register shows a firm's actual permissions, including whether it can approve financial promotions, and national bar and law-society directories confirm standing. We would rather point you at the register than at our guesses.
Whatever route you take to sign-off, an asset that already clears the published marketing rules is a cheaper conversation with counsel and a shorter one with an approver.
This page is general information about how marketing-compliance work is bought and who performs it. It is not legal advice, not a recommendation of any named firm, and not a determination that any provider, tool or approach will satisfy a regulator. Descriptions of third parties are limited to what is publicly published by them, sourced and dated where a figure is quoted; nothing here is a review, rating or endorsement. For a binding view on a specific promotion, authorisation, approval or exemption, retain qualified counsel in the relevant jurisdiction.