What is beneficial ownership?
A beneficial owner is a person who ultimately has the right to some share of a corporate vehicle’s income or assets, or the ability to control its activities. Beneficial ownership transparency reveals how companies and other legal entities or arrangements, such as trusts, are owned and controlled by their beneficial owners.
Journalists can use beneficial ownership information to follow the money.
Businesses can use beneficial ownership information to reduce risk and know who they are doing business with.
Investigators can use beneficial ownership to recover proceeds of crime.
Explore ownership chains, not just owners
We piece together individual disclosures across jurisdictions to show you joined-up ownership structures, all the way to the top of the chain.
Our companies are standardised and normalised, thanks to matching against data from OpenCorporates.
We additionally de-duplicate multiple disclosures from the same people, to ensure you see everything in one place.
All of this data is browsable via interactive graph visualisations, showing you an entire network at a glance.
Freely licensed data, in bulk
We release all of our data openly for anyone to reuse, formatted using the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS).
This data is updated regularly, and made available as a free download under the Open Data Commons Attribution License.
With provenance and history
The best beneficial ownership data is updated regularly meaning that good auditable records are crucial to understand the data.
We keep track of changes where possible and show you a copy of the raw data as well as its source.
Always free of charge, 100% open data
We were created by transparency campaigners, journalists and technologists to advance the state of beneficial ownership transparency. As a result, our data is free to use, and always will be.
We don't only publish open data, we also work with data providers to help them publish open data. This register is a result of combining all of the open data we've found to date.
Our aim is to show the transformative effect of publishing freely and openly.
The case for public beneficial ownership data More about what we do