In June 2011 the Catalan sports professionals register entered a strategic alliance with EREPS, the European Register of Exercise Professionals. The association announced the alliance on 22 June.
EREPS did not try to enrol every exercise professional in Europe from Brussels. The register worked through the bodies that already held the records in each country and knew how people were trained and employed there. Two forms of agreement did that work. An alliance joined a national register to the European one while leaving the national body as it was; the other route, used later in the year for a new register in Ireland, brought a national register into the EREPS programme. Both ended in the same place, with a professional whose qualification had been checked once being recognisable outside the country that issued it.
The value of the register is the check it allows. When an instructor moves between countries, or a member of the public wants to know what the certificate on the wall means, the register is where an answer exists in a form that crosses a border. That is what made alliances worth negotiating: the record is created nationally and recognised at European level. See EREPS and national associations.