Open Ownership

Designing the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard to represent complex corporate networks

Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash

We worked with Open Ownership to launch version 0.4 of BODS, a global standard that makes it easier to collect, share and analyse ownership and corporate ownership and control.

Over 70% of grand corruption cases involve anonymous companies, often using transnational corporate structures. Beneficial ownership reforms address this by collecting information on the individuals who own and control companies globally. Publishing this data in a standardised format helps strengthen financial system trust, improve procurement integrity, and support clean energy value chains.

We’ve worked with Open Ownership on version 0.4 of the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS), a global standard that makes it easier to collect, share, and analyse ownership data. This update simplifies tracking changes in ownership, offering clearer insights into complex corporate networks and promoting greater transparency and accountability.


Our approach

We’ve worked closely with Open Ownership since its inception in 2016 to ensure BODS is designed to help beneficial ownership reform implementers to meet policy goals. Our initial work on BODS provided a sketch of what high quality beneficial ownership data would need to look like to make reforms work.

As the field of beneficial ownership transparency has matured, so has our understanding of user needs, and the standard itself. The latest release of BODS is a wholesale update to the format and structure of the data schema, alongside improvements to guidance and documentation. Our goal was to simplify the data standard, and provide strong foundations as BODS moves towards version 1.0.

Like many of the data standards we build, BODS is developed in the open. We use GitHub as a forum for a feature pipeline, which means we can propose updates to the standard with input from the BODS community, and get feedback from people who publish and use beneficial ownership data. This helps us ensure that BODS is grounded in the needs of people implementing beneficial ownership reforms and working with beneficial ownership data.

As a result, this new release tackles a number of questions about how to represent beneficial ownership and control as data. For example, version 0.4 of BODS has introduced new guidance for tracking changes to data over time, interpreting dates, and representing different kinds of legal arrangements - for example, trusts and nominees. These updates provide a more comprehensive framework for capturing complex ownership structures, making BODS better suited to meet the growing demands of transparency efforts worldwide.


The result

The release of version 0.4 of the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard marks a significant milestone in the global effort to increase transparency and accountability in corporate ownership. By simplifying the data schema and improving guidance, this update addresses the complexities inherent in tracking beneficial ownership, especially in cases involving transnational corporate structures and legal arrangements like trusts and state-owned enterprises.