Methodology Version Register

This update records a two-document amendment dated September 20, 2026. The Independence & Conflict of Interest Policy moves to v1.3 and the Legal Disclaimer & Risk Governance Framework to v1.1, with their predecessors (Rows 22 and 24) marked Superseded.

Unlike the September 10 release, this is not a correction of drift. It is a deliberate change to a public commitment. Policy v1.2 stated that BCI Lab's sole commercial model was research access purchased by buy-side parties, and Section I of that Policy said that changing this would require a public amendment recorded here. Policy v1.3 adds a second, narrowly defined arrangement, the Self-Assessment Engagement, and states the safeguards that fence it from every public reading. Legal Disclaimer v1.1 conforms the one section of that document that described the same commitment in narrower terms. Documents that summarize the earlier wording have not yet been conformed; see Notes on This Register.

Protocol numbering in this stack runs continuously from BCI-FIN-2026-003 through BCI-GOV-2026-012. BCI-*-2026-010 is reserved for an internal document — covering weighting coefficients and risk-factor detail — never intended for external publication. The gap is recorded here, not filled, consistent with how this register already treats the “v3.0” gap in Row 6.

Earlier updates to this register recorded first registrations and corrections: language that had drifted out of step with the document above it. Rows 25 and 26 are different in kind. Independence & Conflict of Interest Policy v1.3 narrows a commitment that v1.2 stated without qualification, and does so by decision. The reason is recorded in the Policy's Version Note and repeated here so that it is not left to be inferred: a structural diagnostic is most useful to the people accountable for the brand it describes, and BCI Lab now offers it to them on a confidential, fixed-fee basis, fenced from all public research.

The change is recorded as a change. Nothing in Row 25 is presented as a clarification, and the v1.2 statement it replaces remains preserved at Row 22.

Three published documents summarize the earlier commercial model and have not yet been conformed to Policy v1.3: BSIP v4.0 §7.2 and its Independence footer line; White Paper v4.0, Section V (Independence); and the About page's statement that BCI Lab does not accept compensation from the entities it evaluates. Each will be conformed at its next revision, and each conformance will be entered here.

Until then, Independence Policy v1.3 governs the commercial-model commitment, as its opening paragraph provides, and where those documents describe it more narrowly, Policy v1.3 is the reference. This register records the gap rather than leaving it to be found.

Core Definitions v1.0 recorded the retired “Brand Climate Index” name as appearing in exactly one place: the Hermès scorecard copyright notice. Preparing the v1.1 update surfaced two further instances, in the January 2026 working drafts of BCI-TEC-2026-008 and BCI-FIN-2026-009, and the count was corrected from one to three.

Preparing the v1.2 update surfaced two more: the unregistered Charter draft superseded at Row 23, and the previously published institutional overview page. The count of confirmed historical instances is corrected here from three to five. Each was removed at the point it was found. That this count has now been revised upward twice is itself the record: a retired name does not disappear on the day it is retired, and the only way to know how far it spread is to keep counting in public.

Rows 23 and 24 each supersede a document that existed, circulated internally, and carried a version label, but was never formally reviewed or entered in this register. One carried two different version numbers within the same text; the other was labeled v2.0 with no registered v1.0 behind it. This is the same failure pattern recorded at Row 6, where a version label circulated in public metadata with no approved document behind it, and at Rows 11–20, where ten protocols existed only as unregistered drafts. The pattern is recorded rather than tidied away: a version number carries no authority until the document behind it has been reviewed and registered here.

The Institutional Methodology Disclosure v2.0 update (Row 5) is the one place in the record where the Decision Binding Interface and the confidence-band DRG mechanism are both traceable to a single event: an April 2026 update that explicitly aligned itself to draft “BSIP v3.0” content that was never itself finalized or formally approved. This is not two unrelated bugs found separately — it is one update whose source material didn't clear governance before being built on. The two further confidence-band references corrected at Rows 21 and 22 trace to the same origin.