Developing the world's first transnational open beneficial ownership register: A brief history of the Open Ownership Register

Summary

After seven years of experimentation, Open Ownership has decided to retire the Open Ownership Register (OO Register), our prototype transnational, open, and public beneficial ownership (BO) register. 

Launched in April 2017, the OO Register has helped users search, explore, and visualise BO data from Armenia, Denmark, Slovakia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom (UK) by transforming national datasets in line with Open Ownership’s Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS). 

To improve the data quality and make it globally usable, Open Ownership reconciled and enriched these datasets, adding in identifiers and information from OpenCorporates and the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation.

International conversations about access to BO data have moved beyond full public access in the years since the OO Register was launched, highlighting the need to find better, more nuanced solutions to delivering the access that a range of actors need to BO data, while appropriately protecting other rights. 

As we see greater adoption of BODS and the publishing of data produced in line with the standard, Open Ownership will be changing how we work with users of BO data around the world. We have launched version 0.4 of BODS and are currently working to update our open-source technology tools to support users of the latest version.

We know that sharing the lessons from our work to use and combine high-quality, international BO data is crucial. This report collates and shares the technical and implementation lessons that we have learned over the last seven years of development on the OO Register – the world’s first transnational open beneficial ownership register.