Filling the semantic gaps for ultimate beneficial ownership data in European Business Wallets
Understanding who owns or controls companies or trusts is seen as crucial to the success of the European Business Wallets initiative by offering a way to cut billions of euros of red tape through speeding up Know Your Customer and ultimate beneficial ownership checks.
In a previous post, I argued that the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) - the world’s leading open standard for how legal persons and arrangements are owned or controlled - has a lot to offer anyone storing beneficial ownership data in business wallets.
Since then, work on the European Business Wallets has moved forward with political negotiations ongoing and technical work taking place through large-scale pilots such as the WE BUILD Consortium.
And something important has changed: European Business Wallets now have their own semantic vocabulary:
In June 2026, WE BUILD’s semantics group published the first version of the EBW Vocabulary, an RDF vocabulary describing the entities, attributes and attestations the wallet will carry.
BODS, in turn, already has its own RDF vocabulary. For the first time, we can talk about aligning these two pieces of work at the level of shared meaning, not just matching up data fields.
Two vocabularies, two layers
The encouraging part is that the EBW Vocabulary and BODS are complementary rather than competing, because they work at different layers.
The EBW Vocabulary handles the verifiable-credential envelope: how an attestation is issued, identified, selectively disclosed and trusted.
BODS handles the ownership-and-control model - who owns or controls whom, by what means, and to what extent. The two meet neatly at the concepts they share: the company, the person and the relationship one has with the other.
There is also a gap to fill. The EBW Vocabulary does not yet model beneficial ownership at all and the WE BUILD Consortium’s draft rulebooks for ownership, control and UBO attestations currently leave their “semantic reference” columns - the slots that record what each field actually means -empty. That is precisely where years of BODS modelling can help.
Why BODS fits
Take indirect ownership. Picture someone who holds 25% of a company directly, and 40% of an intermediate company that holds a further 25% of the same business — giving them 35% overall. The current draft would record a single total percentage and an opaque list of identifiers, with no way to show how that 35% arises.
In contrast, BODS treats each ownership relationship as a statement in its own right, so every link in the chain is captured, and the 35% can be derived and checked rather than simply asserted.
The same strengths apply elsewhere: the wide range of interest types BODS supports, its ability to record ownership as a range rather than a single figure and the way it tracks who declared each fact, when, and how it has changed over time — all essential if obliged entities and registers are to trust the data.
Turning this into a contribution
Rather than only write about this, I’ve taken it to where the work is happening.
After discussing BODS with the WEBUILD team on calls and by email, I’ve put three things on the record via GitHub:
Proposal: use the BODS RDF Vocabulary as the semantic backbone for the ownership / control / UBO terms (Semantic Reference column + vocabulary alignment)
Pull request: Add semantic intake submission: Ownership / Control / UBO use case (BODS-aligned)
Demonstration: Add a BODS demonstrator crosswalk (worked rb-ownership example)
The bigger prize is semantic interoperability: beneficial ownership data that can move between a business wallet, a national register and an analyst’s tools without losing its meaning on the way.
Both communities have done substantial open work here and bringing the two vocabularies into alignment would be a valuable next step.
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.
