We partnered with Open Ownership to build the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard, a global open standard for publishing clear, connected data about corporate ownership and control.
Many countries now require companies to declare their real owners to tackle corruption, illicit finance and unethical behaviours. Making this information useful – for governments, journalists, civil society, and others – means publishing those declarations as open, standardised data.
We work with Open Ownership on the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard. As a global, interoperable standard, BODS makes it easier to collect, share, and analyse beneficial ownership data, promoting transparency, accountability, and trust in businesses.
Our approach
To build BODS, we’ve worked across the full data ecosystem – from policy and regulation to technical design and support for publishers – to make it useful for real world implementation. This means our work on the standard has shaped how we understand good beneficial ownership policy, and our work on policy has shaped how we develop the standard.
One important insight we’ve seen is that legal enforcement of beneficial ownership transparency relies on declarations: someone making a statement about a company’s ownership at a specific point in time. If a declaration is shown to be false, the person or company stating the falsehood is legally liable. This legal context shaped a key feature of the standard – its focus on statements, not just entities. In BODS, the core building blocks are not people or companies, but statements about people and companies.
We also knew that to be truly useful, BODS data needs to be used to connect disclosures across borders to reveal global ownership patterns. We designed BODS to ensure that the standard could handle a range of diverse ownership structures and legal declarations, as well as tracking change over time.
Throughout, we’ve kept a focus on making data useful and usable, including supporting implementers to adapt the standard to their own legal and political settings. In Armenia, for example, we advised public officials to improve their declaration forms. Our guidance made their disclosure forms easier to understand, helping to collect better information about company structures and ensure stronger compliance.
The result
Our work on BODS has supported beneficial ownership reforms in over 40 countries. Governments in the UK, Armenia, and Latvia have committed to publishing beneficial ownership registers using BODS, helping to shine a light on who owns what, and how.