From Seville to global data sharing: why open standards matter for beneficial ownership transparency
Held a year ago in the Spanish city of Seville, the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) delivered something potentially transformative for financial transparency.
The Sevilla Commitment agreed at FfD4 contains some of the strongest international language to date on beneficial ownership transparency.
Governments promised to strengthen beneficial ownership registries, improve international exchange of beneficial ownership information and explore the development of a global beneficial ownership registry.
The challenge now is implementation.
One of the most important, and overlooked, elements of the Sevilla Commitment is its emphasis on high-quality, standardised beneficial ownership information.
This matters because beneficial ownership transparency is not simply about collecting data. It is about making data usable across international borders.
Over the last decade, we have learned that creating registries is only the first step. If every country collects ownership information using different formats, definitions and structures, it becomes extremely difficult to connect records, compare information or trace ownership structures across jurisdictions.
This is where the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) becomes critical.
Developed by Open Ownership and Open Data Services, BODS provides a common framework for modelling and exchanging beneficial ownership information:
By enabling countries to publish ownership data in a consistent format, it allows information from different registries to be connected and analysed more effectively. As adoption grows, the international exchange of beneficial ownership information becomes significantly easier.
I saw this challenge firsthand while working on the Open Ownership Register, the world’s first transnational open beneficial ownership register. Bringing together data from multiple countries demonstrated both the enormous value of connected ownership information and the practical difficulties created by inconsistent data structures and identifiers.
Today, I am exploring the same challenge from a different perspective through OpenCheck, an experimental customer due diligence platform that uses the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), open data and open standards to perform checks across multiple data sources.
Unlike earlier approaches that relied heavily on bulk data aggregation, OpenCheck depends on live APIs and federated access to authoritative sources. The lesson remains the same: interoperability is everything.
The Sevilla Commitment’s call for improved international data sharing is particularly important because national registries alone are not enough. Money moves across borders. Companies operate across borders. Property ownership spans borders. Transparency systems must do the same.
There are already encouraging signs of progress. In 2025, 26 jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and Belgium, committed to implementing the OECD’s new framework for the automatic exchange of information on immovable property.
Importantly, the framework explicitly recognises that information may come from property registers and beneficial ownership registers, creating a foundation for international exchange relating to both legal and beneficial ownership of assets.
The UK’s Illicit Finance Summit - now scheduled for December 2026 - provides an opportunity to build on the momentum created in Seville. The summit is expected to focus on information sharing, asset recovery, real estate transparency and strengthening international partnerships against illicit finance.
If governments are serious about delivering the ambitions of the Sevilla Commitment, they should focus not only on collecting more beneficial ownership information but on ensuring that information can be exchanged, connected and understood across jurisdictions.
The policy commitments have been made. The standards already exist. The next step is turning both into operational reality.
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.
