United Kingdom beneficial ownership data available in line with latest version of global standard

Beneficial ownership data for millions of companies registered in the United Kingdom (UK) and more than 30,000 overseas entities has been transformed and republished in line with the latest version of Open Ownership’s Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS).

The resulting dataset can be freely downloaded, reused, or analysed through our data analysis tools, and it has been republished under an open licence.

This is the second dataset to be published in line with version 0.4 of BODS, and it is the first time that Open Ownership has transformed data from the UK Register of Overseas Entities into BODS.

BODS is the world’s leading standard for beneficial ownership data. In 2022, it was adopted as the UK government’s official open standard for collecting, using, and exchanging beneficial ownership information.

With the increase of stronger international standards on beneficial ownership data in recent years, BODS offers an open solution to the urgent need for greater standardisation. It provides a solid conceptual and practical framework for collecting and publishing beneficial ownership data, resulting in data that is interoperable, more easily reused, and of higher quality.

Open Ownership released version 0.4 of BODS in June 2024, introducing new features to capture high-quality data on how beneficial ownership relationships change over time, how to represent declarations, and how to separate core data from metadata within statements.

Individuals can now make use of these data features by harnessing the UK dataset produced in line with version 0.4 of BODS. Until now, the UK data has been published using version 0.2.

Data from both the UK People with significant control (PSC) Register and the Register of Overseas Entities is published openly for reuse by the UK corporate registrar, Companies House, through a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and other data formats. To transform the UK data, Open Ownership is using both the PSC snapshot and the public data API products.

On GitHub, you can see how Open Ownership has updated how we ingest, map, and transform this data in line with BODS. The data will be refreshed on a regular basis.

We have also written a data use guide to explain our new process and to better support those who want to reuse the updated dataset.

BODS is increasingly becoming a globally recognised data standard. Our latest work demonstrates the value of standardising ownership data from multiple national registers, not just in the UK – which already recommends using BODS to collect, use, exchange, and publish beneficial ownership information – but worldwide. BODS version 0.4 can better support the use of standardised data by a range of actors.

This work is part of Open Ownership’s strategy to ensure more and higher-quality data on the ownership and control of corporate vehicles is available to stakeholders in governments, companies, and civil society.