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

Conclusion

The Taskforce’s work confirms that advancing BO interoperability is both achievable and necessary, but only if approached as a coordinated, multi-actor effort. It will not emerge organically from isolated national reforms or ad hoc technical solutions. Interoperability of BO data is not a technical luxury. It is essential to ensure that ownership transparency strengthens public financial management, enhances domestic resource mobilisation, improves procurement integrity, and counters IFFs in practice.

The pathway forward is practical and incremental. With strong domestic foundations, coordinated international leadership, and sustained investment, interoperable BO systems can become a core component of accountable, resilient, and trustworthy financial systems. Improving access to BO data for key stakeholders, in particular to foreign BO information, is critical to enabling information to be connected across borders to create the transnational pictures of BO networks that many users require.

A consistent theme in this research was the inseparable link between BO data and other ownership-related information, particularly shareholder and company register data. BO registers rarely provide a complete picture on their own; they are most valuable when used alongside corporate structures, shareholding data, and historical registry information. [35]

Interoperability efforts should therefore avoid treating BO registers as isolated systems. Instead, they should be conceived of as part of a broader ownership information ecosystem, where connections between BO data and corporate registers strengthen verification, contextual understanding, and investigative use. This shift is essential if BO data is to effectively support cross-border transparency, risk detection, and enforcement in an increasingly interconnected environment.

To move this agenda forward, stakeholders should draw on the recommendations made by the Taskforce to further explore the most impactful and achievable scenarios for BO interoperability, and build out concrete pathways to test and scale these.

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