Usable beneficial ownership data

  • Publication date: 30 September 2025
  • Author: Open Ownership

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Summary

For beneficial ownership data to be useful it must be usable. Only then can data be used to create impact.

Open Ownership recently undertook a major piece of research to understand the experiences of those who use beneficial ownership data. Embedded within our findings were a number of clear functional requirements for those building, assessing, and seeking to improve beneficial ownership registers.

We have revisited the research with this in mind, identifying 22 features that we believe make beneficial ownership data more usable. This short working paper outlines 1) how we reached this list of features, and 2) the features themselves.

This is a first draft of the framework, and it is likely to evolve over time. Based on our experiences and those of our partners and other interested parties, we will consider whether there is value in building out this framework by adding further information and recommendations.

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