From transparency to trust: Open Ownership strategy 2025 to 2030
Solutions: What we know works
Understanding the networks of relations between individuals, legal entities, and assets (that is, beneficial ownership networks) is critical for effective public financial management. High-quality beneficial ownership data enables governments to mobilise revenue, strengthen public spending, and prevent losses from corruption and IFFs. Beneficial ownership information for legal vehicles is critical for understanding these networks and tracing relationships across borders.
Related information from centralised shareholder, nominee, and asset registers is also relevant and can help fill in the gaps. The value and potential utility of these sources of information in understanding beneficial ownership networks and effectively using beneficial ownership data are currently under-explored. Future BOT reforms and use of beneficial ownership data may benefit from leveraging more sources of information about beneficial ownership networks, rather than only relying on beneficial ownership registers.
Drawing on global experience and our evaluation of beneficial ownership registers of legal vehicles in around 40 jurisdictions, OO believes that the next phase of BOT reforms will need to focus on implementing the following effective, integrated, and outcomes-driven solutions.
The inclusion of BOT sessions during the 2025 AU Specialised Technical Committee meeting on tax and IFFs, which convened some 140 participants from 42 jurisdictions, marked a significant step forward on regional BOT reforms across the continent.
1. Building strong domestic beneficial ownership registers
Government-run registers have become established as the most effective way to collect, maintain, and share information about who really owns companies, trusts, and other legal structures. They provide a systematic means of gathering, maintaining, and sharing beneficial ownership data, making it much easier for regulators, enforcement agencies, and other actors to access reliable ownership information quickly and use it to prevent crime and corruption.
Creating effective central registers requires significant legal, technical, and operational changes. Governments and their partners need to be realistic about the level of investment required, including prioritising better coordination across agencies, training skilled staff, and building strong digital infrastructure. A clear, shared strategy across ministries, regulators, and enforcement bodies is essential to avoid silos and ensure everyone works toward the same goals.
However, BOT reform is still evolving. New challenges continue to emerge, such as deciding how to include trusts effectively, or how to deal with state-owned companies in ownership registers. Frontier issues, such as exploring improved approaches to declaration-based registries and understanding full beneficial ownership networks, require continued learning and knowledge exchange to strengthen practice globally.
2. Ensuring beneficial ownership transparency reforms align with national and regional priorities
Beneficial ownership reforms work best when they are clearly connected to regional and national policy goals. Research funded by OO, along with our experience providing technical assistance to 40 jurisdictions implementing BOT reforms over the past nine years, has shown that a narrow focus on complying with international anti-money laundering standards limits the likelihood of effective and durable reforms that lead to tangible impact.
Evidence from other areas like healthcare and climate policy shows that reforms rooted in broad national interest are more successful and sustainable. [5] The most effective drivers for reform vary by country, but there is huge potential to better link BOT to urgent national goals, such as more effective taxation, improving public procurement, strengthening resource mobilisation from key sectors such as extractives and natural resources, protecting national security, and supporting the rule of law.
By championing BOT as necessary for better governance, economic growth, strengthened national security, and as part of digital public infrastructure initiatives, as well as an anti-money laundering tool, governments can get more buy-in across ministries that support the sustainability of reforms. This broader approach can also help link national reforms to regional goals, such as the African Union’s Agenda 2063 focus on tackling IFFs and nurturing opportunities for regional data sharing through regional bodies such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, among others. [6]
3. Design and implement user-centred reforms that enable effective data use
For BOT to work effectively, reforms must be designed and implemented in ways that meet the needs of the individuals and organisations that will provide as well as use the information. This includes tax officials, procurement officers, investigators, and oversight bodies, as well as civil society and private sector actors where they have access to the information. Some countries already have agile and user-centred approaches to digital public service design – testing, learning, and iterating to build systems that reflect real-world challenges and end-user constraints – and are applying user-centered design principles to the creation of legislative and technical reforms. Scaling these methods can help close the gap between collecting data and putting it to effective use.
Framing beneficial ownership registries as an essential component of effective digital public infrastructure, rather than a niche tool to support specific policy outcomes, such as anti-money laundering, will further increase the impact of reforms and the value they deliver for citizens.
4. Focus on high-impact use cases, especially public procurement and tax systems
Government procurement and domestic resource mobilisation are two areas where there is high untapped potential for beneficial ownership data use to deliver impact. Finding clear ways to integrate beneficial ownership information into procurement processes and tax systems will enable these actors to better leverage BOT reforms to improve resource mobilisation and spend public funds effectively.
Civil society and media play important roles in driving innovation and providing accountability. However, when there is sufficient accountability in place, governments are uniquely positioned to achieve impact at scale through beneficial ownership data use, such as collecting more tax revenue, spending public money more effectively, and stopping money from being hidden or moved illegally. Investing in the skills and capacity of tax agencies, procurement offices, and investigators to use beneficial ownership data can bring significant public benefits.
Additionally, building on existing efforts to use beneficial ownership data in high-risk sectors – such as applying it throughout extractives licensing – can help achieve impact at scale. As the energy transition accelerates, using beneficial ownership data effectively in sectors like critical mineral mining and renewable energy investments can deliver strong social and economic returns.
5. Invest in measuring beneficial ownership data use and impact
To sustain momentum for BOT reforms and ensure future resources are well directed, it is vital to improve understanding and communication on beneficial ownership data use and impact. This means investing in frameworks, methodologies, and studies to track how beneficial ownership data is used and what outcomes it delivers, particularly in improving tax collection, ensuring fair government contracting, and fighting financial crime.
Some countries are already seeing clear benefits, such as recovering more tax revenue and improving public procurement integrity. Building on these successes will help protect and expand progress in a rapidly changing world.
6. Accelerate political, legal, and technical frameworks to access and connect ownership information transnationally
Given the transnational nature of IFFs, BOT reforms must support cross-border use of beneficial ownership data, as well as interoperability between types of beneficial ownership data and other relevant ownership information (e.g. shareholder and asset registries).
As more countries implement BOT reforms, addressing privacy considerations, legal barriers, and interoperability challenges between different countries’ systems will be essential to scaling the use of beneficial ownership data for cross-border financial accountability. While OO has made significant progress defining and shaping what effective implementation looks like, there is significant work to do – for OO and the range of stakeholders engaged in international BOT standards and practices – to overcome legal and technical challenges to sharing information, particularly across borders, in order to scale the use of beneficial ownership data.
Endnotes
[5] Healthcare policy: Santiago Levy, “Progress Against Poverty: Sustaining Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades Program” (Brookings Institution Press, 2006), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt6wpfjp. Climate policy: Dabla-Norris and others, Public Perceptions of Climate Mitigation Policies: Evidence from Cross-Country Surveys. Staff Discussion Note SDN2023/002 (International Monetary Fund, 2003).
[6] African Union, “Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want”, n.d., https://au.int/en/agenda2063/overview.