We partnered with Open Ownership to build the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard, an open standard to collect, share and use data about corporate ownership and control.
When the real people behind companies and corporate vehicles are anonymous, financial crimes and unethical behaviours can thrive. Beneficial ownership reforms are driving a movement to create registers that collect information about the people who own and control companies. But for these reforms to be effective, beneficial ownership information needs to be published as open, standardised data.
We’re working with Open Ownership on the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard, an open data standard for publishing beneficial ownership data. 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 worked across the entire data landscape, from policy and regulation to data standard design and publisher support. 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.
For example, the 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. We needed to make it clear in the data model that ownership statements represent information that has been declared to a registry, not necessarily the truth. As a result, the core data objects in BODS don’t represent companies and people — they represent statements about companies and statements about people.
We also knew that to be truly useful, BODS data needs to be used to connect disclosures from different jurisdictions to reveal global ownership patterns. This meant it was crucial to ensure that the standard could handle a range of diverse ownership structures and legal declarations, as well as tracking change over time.
By taking this end to end approach led by user needs, we helped countries develop legislation that encourages the creation of useful, usable data. In Armenia, for example, we advised public officials on improving declaration forms. Our recommendations made their disclosure forms easier to understand, helping to collect better information about company structures.
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 their beneficial ownership registers using BODS, helping to shed light on corporate ownership and control.
BODS data is now routinely used in financial investigations by organisations like Global Witness, Transparency International, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, helping to uncover financial crimes and corporate wrongdoing.