Why the register entry comes before the fee
A debit card depends on more than the scheme that moves the money. The firm behind it holds your balance, and that firm is the part you can actually check. Fees are the part you shop around; a licence is not something a provider gets to pick, so read the register line before you read the price.
Airwallex lists an entry in more than a single market, PS20200541 and R179622, which gives you another place to verify the name against. A firm supervised in several markets is easier to trace than one that shows only a single market.
Brand names travel badly. Absa appears under separate entries here: Absa Mozambique carries 101220982 and the Absa Uganda virtual multicurrency card carries 4227. Same group, different supervisors, different account types. Check the entry that matches the card in your hand rather than the one that matches the logo.
What the shape of a licence line tells you
Register entries are not written in a single house style, and the format tells you which register to open. Alfa-Bank gives a bare number alongside the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, 1326, while Alfa-Bank Belarus gives a different bare number for the National Bank of Belarus, 22. The brand matches and the registers have nothing to do with each other.
A certificate with an agency name carried in front of it points somewhere else again. Axos Bank carries FDIC cert 35546 and Banco Santander carries FDIC cert 29950. The identical pattern covers firms with no connection to each other, so the pattern on its own tells you nothing; the agency and the identifier together do the work.
Some entries name the permission, not just the supervisor. ANZ Credit Cards shows an Australian credit licence, 234527, which is a lending permission rather than a deposit-taking one. If you are weighing where your money sits, that difference decides which question to put to the provider.
Baanx is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a cryptoasset business under the United Kingdom's anti-money-laundering, terrorist-financing and payer-information rules, 927401. An activity registration of that kind describes what the firm may do; it is not a statement that a bank holds your balance. Alior's entry, PSD_PI FR_ACPR!89914, folds the country and agency into the string, which is how a French register writes it.
Fees, and the account type they belong to
Read every fee line in full, for the amount and for the account type printed beside it. A fee stripped of its account type is a number you cannot carry into a comparison, and the same firm can price a personal account, a business account and a prepaid card in quite different ways.
Prepaid and multi-currency products are where this matters most, because you load the balance yourself. The fees that count there are the ones on loading, converting and withdrawing, not a monthly account fee charged for holding money. A business account such as ABN AMRO Zakelijk is priced on a different basis again, and a credit card product is built around money you borrow rather than money you have stored.
The crypto debit cards ranking helps for a blunt reason: it places products from different licence regimes side by side, where the fee column can mean different things on each row. Read the account type on every row before treating any pair of prices as comparable, and keep a conversion fee on a multi-currency card apart from an account fee.
Write each price down with its account type attached. A discount on an account you would never open is not a saving, and two providers quoting similar amounts for different account types are not quoting the same product.
Money safety: what a licence answers and what it leaves out
A licence answers a narrow question: is this firm allowed to take deposits and issue cards in that market. It does not answer what happens to your balance if the firm stops trading, and that is a separate line to look for on the review rather than something to infer from the licence. Protection follows the balance and the entity holding it, not the card in your wallet.
AffinityPlus Credit Union is a member-owned credit union with a US agency entry, 24362. A credit union is a different kind of institution from a commercial bank, so the register you open and the questions you ask there are not the ones you would ask elsewhere.
Feature labels do not move money. The Absa Uganda virtual multicurrency card is virtual and multi-currency, and the entry behind it, 4227, tells you who supervises the firm, not who holds your balance or which currency it sits in. A multi-currency balance adds a currency choice to your list of risks, and that belongs on the same page as the licence line.
A comparison routine you can repeat on any provider
Work down the review in a fixed order: the licence line, the legal entity behind the brand, the account type, the fees belonging to it, the protection line, then the currency the balance would be held in. ANNA Money's entry, 900594, and ABN AMRO Zakelijk's entry with the AFM, 12020215, sit in different markets, so the same routine sends you to different registers.
Open the register and match the legal name, not the brand you searched for. Where a brand spans markets, as Absa does across Absa and Absa Seychelles, the licence check belongs to each card rather than to the group.
The routine holds on listings further down the alphabet too, including Advcash (Advanced Cash) Card and AffinityPlus Credit Union. Where a page shows no register entry, treat the licence as unanswered rather than assumed; a price with an unknown holder behind it is not a deal.
Bakai Bank shows what a short entry looks like, 043: a short string, a named supervisor, a market you can look up. Length means nothing. What matters is that the name on the register matches the name on the account, and that you know which register to search when you need to check.
The order that settles most comparisons
Licence, register, account type, fee, protection, currency. Applied in that order it removes most of the arguments that waste time, because a fee only means something against the account it applies to, and a brand name only means something against the register that supervises it.
Across the providers here the entries range from a short national identifier such as 043 to a prefixed certificate such as FDIC cert 35546, and the pattern holds in every case: a named supervisor, an identifier you can look up, and a market that tells you which rules apply to the account. Compare providers on that basis first and the price comparison finally means something.