What is beneficial ownership?
Beneficial ownership and control is about the people who ultimately call the shots, or receive the benefits, from a company. Disclosure can help bring an end to the abuse of anonymous companies.
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 the OpenCorporates API.
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 as an open ledger, formatted using the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS).
This data is updated monthly, and made available as a free download under the Open Data Commons Attribution License.
Currently containing over 20 million BODS statements, in a 21GB JSONLines file.
With provenance and history
The best beneficial ownership data is updated regularly. We keep track of changes in source that you can see not only who controls a company today, but who controlled it last week, or last year too.
Where we can, we include full provenance information - so you can see where our data has come from, and how it has changed. And if you see something that needs updating - you can go back to the source to ask for those changes.
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. The 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.