Making beneficial ownership data public, making sure it is used and realising its value
Knowing who really owns or controls entities such as companies or trusts is a crucial part of anti-money laundering investigations, customer due diligence processes, sanctions checks and supply chain monitoring.
The best way to find such information is via beneficial ownership transparency where information on the real people who own or control entities is collected to be used by governments, banks, investigators, journalists and — sometimes — the public.
But carrying out such checks is currently often costly and complicated by the wide global variances in the political, legal and technical realities of the countries collecting beneficial ownership information in a world where investigations are multi-jurisdictional and data needs to be linked up. Having improved access to more standardised beneficial ownership data would generate a lot of economic benefits and value.
This post is about what we can learn from the example of the United Kingdom which has made its beneficial ownership data publicly and openly available for nearly the last decade. How many people use that data? How much value does it generate? How can it be used more in future?
Background
For four years, I led the technology and data team at Open Ownership, a leading non-profit organisation focused on beneficial ownership transparency.
Open Ownership believes that information on the true owners of companies is an essential part of a well-functioning economy and society.
In my role, I provided technical assistance to governments across the world from Canada to South Africa and Nigeria to Indonesia to help them collect and use high-quality beneficial ownership information. I was also the product owner of the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS), the world’s leading open standard for beneficial ownership data.
Countries across the globe have created beneficial ownership registers in recent years but there is still a lot of work to do to make it possible to connect and use information from these data sources.
The example of the United Kingdom
I very much appreciate that Companies House in the United Kingdom makes official beneficial ownership information openly available from both the People with significant control (PSC) Register and Register of Overseas Entities via public search, in a range of data formats as well as via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
It is this openness which allowed my former team to take the UK’s data, enrich and republish it in a standardised format using an open source process and then offer it for anyone to explore via the world’s first transnational open beneficial ownership register:
Researchers such as my former colleague Maria Jofre and her collaborator Andres Knobel from the Tax Justice Network have freely used the data to explore and analyse the ownership structures of UK legal entities in a reproducible way:
Open Ownership also used this open data to show how to spot common red flags in the UK’s data, combine it with procurement and sanctions information for risk/compliance checks and help anyone understand trends for companies logged in the PSC Register or where entities in the Register of Overseas Entities came from (see image below).
How many people use the UK’s data?
In the last 10 years, Companies House reports that the appetite for its company and PSC data has grown more than tenfold from 1.3 billion requests in 2015/16 to 16.5 billion in 2023/24:
At the 2024 Corporate Registers Forum held in Qatar, Charlie Boundy, Companies House’s first chief data officer, revealed that there were 2,865 organisations subscribed to Companies House’s APIs and a further 56 bulk data consumers who use it for a wide range of purposes:
Beneficial ownership/PSC information is only part of the picture here — but it is a valued piece of the puzzle.
How much value does the UK’s data generate?
In 2019, Companies House data was estimated to be worth £1 billion to £3 billion per year to users with PSC information accounting for around 4% of the total value — and up to 13% of the value for ‘high use’ users.
Research unveiled in 2024 reinforced these findings and quantified the value of the reforms that Companies House is currently going through. This report found that “private sector users currently value company information significantly more than financial information” with “around 80–90% of value … attributable to the detail provided for Company Directors and Persons with Significant Control (PSCs)”.
Doing more work to improve data quality and carry out more validation checks would only increase the value, researchers found.
How can the UK’s data be used more in future?
In its new 2025–2030 strategy, Companies House sets out a goal to go beyond publishing open data to realising its full value by “lead[ing] the corporate registry standard in quality and transparency that others will seek to follow, harnessing the power of reliable data to foster business confidence and support global innovation”.
This will be achieved by becoming a “more modern, technology-enabled and data led organisation, with transparency at [its] heart” to “strengthen … resilience, capability, and capacity to provide user-centred services and valuable data, long into the future”.
The organisation’s 2025/26 business plan sets out plans to “mature our tooling, data access and skills” by working on a new cloud data platform to “increase our speed and agility to better support improvements in data quality, performance reporting and segmentation”.
The plan also calls for “increased adoption of government data standards into [Companies House] digital services” and so I hope there may be a role for the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard which is the UK government’s official standard for the collection, use and exchange of beneficial ownership information.
Conclusion
Even after years of publishing open beneficial ownership information which has been widely used and has generated millions of pounds of value, Companies House knows that doing more work in terms of enhancing data quality and usefulness will create more economic gains.
As countries and policymakers seek to understand and better document the impact of beneficial ownership transparency reforms, there is a lot to learn from the UK’s approach and the lessons it has generated over the last decade.
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.
