Challenges in realising the goal of the EU’s Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System
In the summer of 2024, the European Union passed a new anti-money laundering package with updated rules that member states have to implement in the coming years.
Strengthening beneficial ownership transparency, enhancing data quality and improving access to beneficial ownership data from across Europe were key areas of focus.
Announcing the package, the European Parliament promised that the changes would “ensure that people with a legitimate interest, including journalists, media professionals, civil society organisations, competent authorities, and supervisory bodies, will have immediate, unfiltered, direct and free access to beneficial ownership information held in national registries and interconnected at EU level”.
A proposed solution to delivering on this promise is the enhancement of the Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System (BORIS), a central European platform through which users with legitimate interest are due to be able to access all this information.
Introducing BORIS
BORIS is “a tool for linking national central registers containing information on the beneficial owners of companies and other legal entities, trusts and other types of legal arrangements”.
The platform promises the ability to “search for a company, legal entity, trust or legal arrangement and access information on its beneficial owner(s) supplied by the national registers” and notes that it will “gradually connect the beneficial ownership registers of all EU countries as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway”.
The current iteration of BORIS has existed for years. Yet as of May 2025, only 12 EU member states have taken steps to make company beneficial ownership information searchable via the platform:
- Austria 🇦🇹
- Belgium 🇧🇪
- Cyprus 🇨🇾
- Finland 🇫🇮
- France 🇫🇷
- Germany 🇩🇪
- Greece 🇬🇷
- Hungary 🇭🇺
- Iceland 🇮🇸
- Latvia 🇱🇻
- Netherlands 🇳🇱
- Spain 🇪🇸
It is unclear — but unlikely — that any information on the beneficial ownership of trusts or legal arrangements is searchable yet.
So how does BORIS work?
Crucially BORIS acts as a search interface to show where beneficial ownership records live — rather than linking up the actual records from member state beneficial ownership registers.
Implementing regulations issued in 2021 set out how member states should make their beneficial ownership data available for people to search via BORIS using the name or identifier of a legal entity and arrangement — or the full name and birth date of a natural person who is a beneficial owner.
For now, BORIS only support searches using entity names or identifiers — but the regulations clearly establish that people with legitimate interest should in future be able to search using a person’s name and also for beneficial ownership information on legal arrangements.
The regulations go on to say that “the data from the BO record shall be modelled based on the established interface specification” but unfortunately the “reference data artefacts, such as code lists, controlled vocabularies and glossaries” relating to BORIS are only available to member state registry teams and not publicly shared.
Who has legitimate interest and what information will they be able to access?
Article 12 of the sixth anti-money laundering directive — which formed part of the anti-money laundering package — sets out which natural or legal persons have legitimate interest:
Standardised rules on how people will need to prove they fit into one of these legitimate interest categories are due to be published by 10 July 2025 at the latest.
Article 12 also states that those with legitimate interest should be able to access both “historical information on the beneficial ownership of the legal entity or the legal arrangement” as well as “a description of the control or ownership structure”.
So seeing as lots of people are due to get access to current and historical beneficial ownership information via BORIS, what are the challenges which those implementing the system might face in coming years?
Challenge 1: Searching by person name
The 2021 regulations say that EU registers need to allow BORIS to search records using a person’s name and date of birth to see if they are listed in beneficial ownership data sources:
Research from my former team at Open Ownership found that at least some existing EU beneficial ownership registers do not seem to support searching by a person’s name to find if they are a beneficial owner:
Person name search across full national beneficial ownership datasets can prove challenging as many registers may use an entity-centric data approach making it easier to search for all the data linked to entities rather than people.
Another issue which arises when it comes to searching by people’s names are cases where nominee arrangements are used to conceal the identity of beneficial owners. The new EU AML rules include disclosure requirements for nominee shareholders and nominee directors so BORIS may need a mechanism to note where disclosed natural persons you are searching for are actually nominees rather than the beneficial owners themselves.
Challenge 2: Searching for information on trusts or similar legal arrangements
The 2021 regulations say that users will be able to search for beneficial ownership information on trusts or similar legal arrangements using national registration numbers — but also go on to note that member states can choose not to issue ID numbers for trusts:
This could make it very difficult for those with legitimate interest to be able to search for information on legal arrangements as these may not have ID numbers and their names may be difficult to get hold of given that trust registers are often more difficult to access than company registers.
Challenge 3: Adapting BORIS to align with forthcoming updated format
As stated above, BORIS acts as a search interface for EU beneficial ownership registers but does not mandate standardised rules for member states to follow so that the data they are collecting is easily comparable.
However, the sixth anti-money laundering directive says:
To ensure a level playing field in the application of the concept of beneficial owner, it is essential that, across the Union, uniform reporting channels and means exist for legal entities and trustees of express trusts or persons holding an equivalent position in similar legal arrangements. To that end, the format for the submission of beneficial ownership information to the relevant central registers should be uniform and offer guarantees of transparency and legal certainty.
A deadline is given for such a format to be set out:
By 10 July 2025, the Commission shall establish, by means of implementing acts, the format for the submission of beneficial ownership information as referred to in Article 62 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 to the central register, including a checklist of minimum requirements for the information to be examined by the entity in charge of the central register.
It remains to be seen how ambitious the European Commission will be when setting out this format in the coming months. Will it simply mandate a common set of data fields to be collected or will it go further to recommend a comprehensive data standard that all registers should adopt to make their data uniform and interoperable?
Whichever route is taken, BORIS will need to be updated in years to come once EU member states adapt their beneficial ownership registers in line with this new format.
Challenge 4: Capturing the full range of ways that people exert ownership or control
Announcing the stricter beneficial ownership rules in the AML package, European authorities were keen to emphasise how their definition of beneficial ownership is based on two components — ownership and control — “which both need to be analysed to identify all the beneficial owners of that legal entity or across types of entities”.
While capturing beneficial ownership relationships based on ownership using measures such as shareholding or voting rights can be more straightforward to calculate, there are differences in how authorities in different jurisdictions define the types of influence or control which individuals can exert that also constitute beneficial ownership.
Member states will need to make sure that they are positioned to capture such mechanisms of beneficial ownership in order to ensure that the information they collect is adequate to understand the full range of ways that people exert both ownership and control over legal entities and legal arrangements, including where senior managing officials need to be disclosed when beneficial owners cannot be identified.
Challenge 5: Representing ownership or control structures which are multi-jurisdictional
While BORIS aims to make it possible to search for beneficial ownership information on individual legal entities or legal arrangements, how will those with legitimate interest receive “a description of the control or ownership structure” if the structure is complex or multi-jurisdictional?
The European Council claim that the new AML rules applicable to multi-layered ownership and control structures mean “hiding behind multiple layers of ownership of companies won’t work anymore”.
But with each member state register collecting beneficial ownership information following its own rules with subtle or major differences in how data is structured, linking data on multiple entities or arrangements into an understandable structure or network could be cumbersome or impossible.
A future solution: the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard
The Beneficial Ownership Data Standard is the world’s leading open standard for adequate, accurate and up-to-date beneficial ownership information.
It provides a free-to-use specification for modelling and exchanging high-quality data on the beneficial ownership and control of companies, trusts and other types of entities and arrangements. Full documentation is publicly available in English, French, Spanish and Russian.
It has been developed since 2018 by Open Ownership, a non-profit organisation focused on beneficial ownership transparency, in partnership with Open Data Services.
The data standard answers all the needs and future requirements of BORIS set out above. It is designed to structure and connect information from any country in any language on companies, trusts, nominee arrangements and direct or indirect beneficial ownership networks, no matter how complicated the network is or how many layers of ownership or control are involved.
A wide range of interest types are listed in the documentation to allow implementers to capture details about the nature of ownership and control relationships which may constitute beneficial ownership.
Information update requirements help capture all changes over time to explain historical information and diagrams explaining ownership or control structures can be created for free using an open-source visualisation library. This library is already in use by national beneficial ownership registers in Armenia and Botswana.
Conclusion
Countries across the world are adopting the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard as part of ongoing reforms. The more countries there are structuring their data in a standardised way, the easier the international exchange of beneficial ownership information will become.
Given the challenges ahead in achieving the ambitious goal of granting immediate, unfiltered, direct and free access to EU beneficial ownership information via BORIS, I hope that the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard offers guidance or examples which can prove useful in realising this goal.
For four years, I was the product owner of the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard, the world’s leading open standard for beneficial ownership information and continue to advocate to improve beneficial ownership data quality and standardisation. To learn more or if you need technical guidance or consultancy support, contact me via beneficialownership.co.uk.
