How the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard can help to share information on corporate structures
Requesting information on how companies are owned or controlled by people or other companies is a crucial part of onboarding processes as well as supporting know your customer and due diligence checks.
It is also a vital component of beneficial ownership transparency which seeks to help look through corporate structures to find the real people who ultimately own or control entities.
The challenge is that corporate structures are often complex and organisations may be asked to provide information about these structures multiple times in a wide variety of formats: sometimes as a diagram; sometimes by submitting data via forms; and sometimes by providing a description of the corporate structure.
This can make it difficult to easily understand and use the information.
Wouldn’t it be much easier if there was a common, standardised way to exchange data to explain corporate structures - how companies or entities are owned or controlled and by whom? And then to generate visualisations of those structures that are easy for everyone to understand?
The Beneficial Ownership Data Standard offers a solution
The Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) is the world’s leading open standard for structuring and exchanging high-quality data on beneficial ownership.
To generate high-quality data about beneficial ownership networks, BODS offers a data model for collecting information on people, entities and the relationships between them. Relationships can involve nominees, trusts or long, indirect ownership chains — BODS can handle it all. And BODS can be used to represent people holding a wide range of interests in entities or relationships with them whether they be shareholders, board members, senior managing officials or trustees.
Not only that, but data produced in line with BODS can be visualised for free using an open-source visualisation library already in use by several governments across the world.
Crucially a lot of the beneficial ownership information submitted to registrars the world over to explain ownership chains duplicates information held in company registers where it is used to help understand corporate structures.
Making things simpler
So imagine you’ve already gone to the effort of submitting your beneficial ownership information to a register where it has been captured in line with BODS.
Wouldn’t it make things simpler for you if you could take and reuse the data to explain your corporate structure by sharing it with businesses you interact with, even if you choose just to share the corporate structure information and not to reveal ultimate beneficial ownership relationships?
Why this matters
In 2025, the European Commission has launched a drive to “cut red tape and simplify EU rules for citizens and business”. This includes goals to speed up due diligence processes.
Meanwhile the latest EU directive to corporate registrars on the use of digital tools notes that “groups of companies can have a complex structure” and urges member states to share public visual representations of company structures to give “a user-friendly, easily accessible and comprehensive overview of the group of companies and facilitate a better understanding of its method of operation”.
And future anti-money laundering standards drafted by the European Banking Authority plan to give authorities the power to require customers to submit an organigram to help explain complex ownership and control structures which involve legal arrangements, multiple jurisdictions, nominee relationships or suspicious opacity.
Surely all of these processes could be simplified and supported by having reusable, standardised ownership data from company or beneficial ownership registers/services which could be easily visualised?
Case study: Structuriser from the eWealth Global Group
A product putting this principle into practice is Structuriser, which has been created by the eWealth Global Group (EWG) in Jersey using BODS.
EWG needed a structured, manageable way for its clients to explain their complex corporate structures so that EWG could streamline the work they needed to do in order to handle international payments for them and provide other services.
So EWG built a visual management tool that enables teams to create and manage corporate structures. Using their own visualisation software, EWG provides views of these structures and stores them in BODS format to make it easy to export and share the data in multiple formats including as a PDF.
Visit structuriser.com to find out more and to register your interest in the tool.
Conclusion
Standardising data on how companies and other entities are owned or controlled by people using BODS offers a range of benefits and could help reduce duplication, save time and speed up onboarding or due diligence checks by creating information which is reusable and portable.
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.
