Your Compliance Team Is Tracking Licenses in Spreadsheets. That Ends Now.

A stablecoin issuer operating in the US, EU, Hong Kong, and Singapore today manages a minimum of 30 distinct licenses. Each one has its own application timeline, renewal cycle, conditions, filing requirements, and responsible counsel. The US alone can require a separate Money Transmitter License in every state you touch — 15 states means 15 licenses, each with independent renewal dates and condition sets.

Some use Notion databases. A few have actual legal calendar tools that their firms pay $30K/year for — tools that were built for general financial regulation and have never heard of an E-Money Token Authorization or an HKMA Fiat-Referenced Stablecoin license.

This is the problem we built the License Tracker to solve.

The Operational Reality Nobody Talks About

When we wrote about how to launch a stablecoin in 2026, the licensing section covered jurisdictions and costs. What it didn't cover was the ongoing operational burden after you get the license. Because getting the license is the easy part.

The hard part is what comes after:

MiCA NCA authorizations across EU member states require ongoing capital buffer reporting — 2% of average reserve assets for Asset-Referenced Tokens, recalculated quarterly. Miss a quarterly filing and your NCA can initiate a review. The GENIUS Act mandates monthly reserve attestations by registered accounting firms. The HKMA's Stablecoins Ordinance, effective since August 2025, attaches conditions to licenses — minimum paid-up capital of HK$25 million, segregation of reserves in trust, prohibition on paying interest — and each condition needs documented evidence of compliance.

A single missed MTL renewal in one US state can cascade. Some states have reciprocity agreements; others treat a lapse in one jurisdiction as a material change that triggers review in their own. A compliance officer we spoke to described it as "playing whack-a-mole with deadlines across 12 time zones."

Spreadsheets don't scale for this. They don't alert you at 90 days. They don't enforce valid status transitions. They can't tell you that a suspended license should trigger a posture downgrade across your entire framework assessment.

What We Actually Built

The License Tracker lives inside the compliance module — the same module that already gives you framework assessments across 12+ regulatory regimes and calculates your compliance posture score.

Here's what it does, concretely:

A single portfolio view across all jurisdictions

Every license your organization holds — active, pending, conditional, suspended, expired — in one table. Sortable by jurisdiction, framework, status, owner, or expiry date. You filter by region, by framework, by the person responsible. No more cross-referencing three spreadsheets and a shared calendar.

Proactive renewal alerting

Licenses expiring within 90 days are flagged amber. Under 30 days, red. Overdue, critical. A renewal calendar gives your team a 12-month view of every upcoming deadline. This isn't a notification you might miss in Slack — it's a persistent visual state in the tool your compliance team already uses daily.

Condition tracking with evidence

Every license condition — "maintain minimum capital of EUR 350,000," "submit quarterly reserve composition report," "segregate client assets in trust" — tracked individually with status, due date, and evidence links. Overdue conditions are flagged red. Your CCO can see, at a glance, how many conditions are met versus outstanding across the entire portfolio.

Posture integration

This is the part that matters most. If your organization tracks a framework (say, MiCA) and that framework has a licensing requirement, but you don't have an active or conditional license recorded — your compliance posture score degrades to non-compliant automatically. License status feeds directly into the posture dashboard. A license suspension doesn't just appear in the license table; it downgrades your overall framework posture and surfaces as a critical action item.

This maps to the same layered decision architecture we described in the Three-Color Evaluation Stack. License status is the Rule layer — deterministic, hard fences. The posture score is the evaluation. Your compliance team makes the judgment calls on what to remediate first.

Audit trail

Every status change, every condition update, every document upload — logged with who did it and when. When your board asks for a license portfolio summary, you export CSV or PDF. What used to take your legal team two hours of spreadsheet assembly now takes a button click.

Why This Matters Right Now

If you've been following our coverage of the regulatory landscape, you know the direction of travel. The GENIUS Act is law. MiCA Title III/IV enforcement is live. HKMA licensing is active. Singapore's MAS framework is established. The UK FCA is consulting. Switzerland's FINMA is proposing a new "Payment Instrument Institution" license category.

Every one of these regimes requires you to hold and maintain a license — not just obtain one, but actively manage its lifecycle, fulfill its conditions, and renew it on time.

The compliance teams that are still tracking this manually are the same teams that will miss a renewal deadline when three jurisdictions happen to align in the same quarter. That's not a hypothetical — it's an operational certainty for any issuer managing 30+ licenses across a dozen time zones.

We built the License Tracker because the compliance dashboard we shipped earlier gave teams framework awareness — but awareness without operational tracking leaves a gap. You know which frameworks apply to you, but you can't tell whether your licenses under those frameworks are current, conditional, or about to lapse.

The Boring Operational Details That Keep CCOs Up at Night

A few things we handle that might seem minor until you've been burned:

Perpetual licenses

Some EU EMI authorizations don't expire — they're perpetual. The tracker handles this without showing phantom renewal dates. It displays "Perpetual" and excludes these from the renewal calendar.

Status transition enforcement

You can't set a revoked license back to active through the UI. The system enforces valid transitions: pending can move to active, conditional, or withdrawn. Revoked is terminal. This prevents data entry errors that could misrepresent your compliance posture to your board.

Multi-license frameworks

The US Money Transmitter License model means you might have 15+ licenses under a single framework. The tracker handles each individually — because each state has its own renewal date, conditions, and filing requirements. The summary metrics count each license separately so your 47-license portfolio accurately reflects 47 distinct operational obligations.

Document management

Approval letters, condition notices, application forms, renewal filings — attached directly to the license record. No more digging through shared drives or email threads to find the HKMA approval letter from six months ago.

What This Means for Your Workflow

If you're using the compliance module today, the License Tracker is a new tab in your sidebar. It connects to the frameworks you already track and the posture scores you already monitor. You add your licenses, assign owners on your team, and the system starts working — flagging deadlines, tracking conditions, feeding status into your posture calculations.

If you're not using the compliance module yet, this is a good reason to start. The compliance dashboard, framework assessments, posture scoring, and now license lifecycle management — together, they replace the patchwork of spreadsheets, calendars, and $30K RegTech subscriptions that most compliance teams are cobbling together.

The regulatory sandbox is where you experiment. The compliance module is where you operate. The License Tracker makes the operational side actually manageable.

The License Tracker is available now in the Compliance module for all authenticated users. Log in to start tracking your license portfolio.