Connecting ownership data: Practical pathways to tackle cross-border financial crime

Annex 1. Case study summary – the Business Registers Interconnection System

Background

BRIS is the EU’s framework for linking national business registers across all member states. Operational since 2017, BRIS enables the seamless exchange and retrieval of company information across borders through a single European access point, supporting transparency and the functioning of the EU’s single market.

Rather than replacing national systems, BRIS connects them through a common set of technical, legal, and semantic standards established under the EU Company Law Directive and implemented through the ECP. Its development was built directly upon earlier research and modelling work under the BBusiness Registry Interoperability Throughout Europe project, which laid the conceptual foundation for harmonising company data semantics across diverse jurisdictions.

Semantic interoperability

BRIS achieves semantic interoperability through a shared vocabulary and data model that defines core concepts such as Company, Branch, Legal Form, and Registration Event. This semantic layer allows each member state to retain its own database structures while mapping national terms to a harmonised European schema. The introduction of the EUID provides a common semantic anchor for identifying legal vehicles across borders. This approach ensures that data exchanged through BRIS has a consistent meaning, enabling accurate comparison and integration regardless of the source.

Governance interoperability

The BRIS governance model is federated but rule based. Each member state remains responsible for the integrity and accuracy of its national register, while the European Commission oversees system-level coordination, security, and evolution of standards. Operational procedures, change management, and compliance monitoring are conducted through a structured governance framework involving the member states’ business register authorities and the Commission. This balance between decentralised ownership and central coordination ensures both flexibility and accountability – a model that has proven sustainable over time and resilient to political change.

Technological interoperability

Technologically, BRIS relies on the ECP – a secure intermediary infrastructure that enables data exchange between national registers using standardised XML message formats, shared service protocols, and public-key authentication. The system’s architecture is fully federated, meaning that each national register maintains its own data while BRIS manages the routing, validation, and translation of messages. This modular setup allows new member states and data types to be integrated without altering existing systems, demonstrating scalability and robustness.

How the Business Registers Interconnection System paved the way for the Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System

The success of BRIS directly informed the creation of BORIS, which extends the same interoperability principles to transparency of ownership and control. BORIS reuses key constructs developed under BRIS – notably the EUID, the European Core Platform, and the shared messaging infrastructure – but adapts them to handle the more sensitive and complex semantics of BO data. BRIS proved that interoperability can be achieved through semantic alignment and standardised interfaces without centralising data, paving the way for BORIS to connect national BO registers in a secure, decentralised manner.

In essence, BORIS represents a logical and evolutionary step, applying the BRIS model of shared meaning, distributed governance, and trusted exchange to a new domain with greater analytical and regulatory significance.

Lessons learned

• Semantic clarity enables legal diversity: Shared meaning, not uniform databases, made EU-wide interoperability possible.
• Stable governance sustains technical trust: Clear roles and coordination mechanisms underpin the system’s continuity. Governance is anchored within the relevant EU Directives and implementing regulations.
• Modular technology ensures scalability: BRIS’s layered architecture accommodates growth without systemic redesign.
• BRIS created the foundation for BORIS: The reuse of its infrastructure and identifiers demonstrates the long-term value of designing for interoperability from the outset.

For BO interoperability, BRIS shows that alignment of meaning, rules, and trust mechanisms is the cornerstone of sustainable cross-border data exchange.

Next page: Annex 2. Case study summary – the Business and Financial and Data Exchange