OpenCorporates - The largest open database of companies in the world

How Shield Compliance uses registry data to power compliance for high-risk businesses

Shield Compliance builds the software that allows banks, credit unions, and other financial service providers to serve high-risk businesses. It started in cannabis banking in 2018 and now also covers hemp, money services businesses, and digital assets. For high-risk businesses, like cannabis, Shield validates for its clients that businesses are licensed by the state and are in good standing. Shield uses OpenCorporates as the source to verify this data.

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October 12, 2026

Case studies / Entity Verification

How FactSet automated entity matching against official registry data

FactSet has built a model that automatically matches the companies in its database to official registry records on OpenCorporates, as part of a larger strategy to ensure their legal entity data coverage is updated and accurate. It uses software to achieve what a researcher used to do by hand: search for a company, work through the candidates that come back, and identify the one official record that is genuinely the right match. Across several thousand test companies, it reaches match rates of up to around 70 percent, with almost no false positives.

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September 11, 2026

Data / legal

OpenCorporates Achieves ISO/IEC 27701:2025 Certification for Privacy Information Management

OpenCorporates, the largest open database of legal entity data in the world, today announced that it has achieved certification to ISO/IEC 27701:2025, the international standard for privacy information management systems (PIMS). The certification was awarded following an independent audit by DNV, which recorded no non-conformities against the standard. It sits alongside the company's existing ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification for information security, making OpenCorporates a dual ISO certification holder for the first time in its history.

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September 3, 2026

Data / Policy

The US has stopped collecting who owns its companies, and no one can fill that gap

On 11 August, FinCEN issued a final rule permanently removing the requirement for US companies and US persons to report who owns them. It also confirmed that it will delete records already in the database wherever it believes they belong to a US person. The Washington Post covered it the same day. So the gap is permanent, and the brief federal record of who owns American companies is being erased.

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August 20, 2026

Case studies / Entity Verification / Fraud Investigations

How the Treasury’s Do Not Pay program uses OpenCorporates data to check a business is real before it pays it

On August 18, 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury published a one-page notice in the Federal Register titled: Designation of Databases to the Do Not Pay Working System. It marks the moment OpenCorporates data has officially been integrated into the system the federal government uses to decide whether a business should be paid, closing a process opened two months earlier, on the 25th of June 2026, when the Treasury published its proposed designation publicly.

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August 19, 2026

Entity Verification / Case studies / Fraud Investigations

How NICB uses OpenCorporates to detect insurance fraud and verify business legitimacy

The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating insurance fraud and crime. Using OpenCorporates' legal entity data covering all North American jurisdictions, NICB has enhanced their fraud detection capabilities, allowing them to verify business legitimacy, track entity relationships, and identify fraudulent patterns. This partnership has also enabled NICB to build a data-driven case for policy advocacy around registry transparency, demonstrating the societal value that open legal entity data provides.

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August 6, 2026

Data / Entity Verification

The registered agent called “Located In”

Every company register insists on a registered agent: a name and a street address where lawsuits and state letters can reach someone who will actually notice. The OpenCorporates API exposes this twice. Once on the company record, as agent_name. Once in the officers list, as whoever holds the agent role. I wanted to see what edge cases of those names, so I searched the officers endpoint for a phrase instead of a person. I typed LOCATED IN. The API came back with two thousand and eleven matches.

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July 22, 2026

Data / Entity Verification

The church incorporated in the year one

The other week I was testing a company data API, running harmless searches against Connecticut to see how the search behaved. I asked for companies whose names contain the word "New". Back came the usual spread of LLCs and property vehicles, and then a result that literally stopped me mid-scroll: ST. PETER'S CHURCH OF NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT. Company number 0065179. Status: Active. Company type: Special Chartered. Incorporation date: 3 January 0001 (over 2025 years ago).

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July 8, 2026

Case studies / Data Access / Fraud Investigations

How the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is still finding ownership when 99% of companies have gone dark

A new report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns that a 2025 rule change stripped beneficial ownership reporting from more than 99 percent of US companies. That gap makes it harder to see who is behind a business, and it is the second time in just over a year that the GAO has raised the same concern. Its forensic investigators use primary-source legal entity data from OpenCorporates to keep tracing those connections anyway.

2 Comments

June 10, 2026

Case studies / Entity Resolution / Entity Verification

Case study: Why automating fund verification is the new standard for Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) providers

This case study examines how leading CLM providers are addressing unprecedented challenges through automated fund verification, drawing on real-world implementations that demonstrate measurable improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and client satisfaction. The evidence shows that automation has evolved from a competitive advantage to a fundamental requirement for CLM providers serving the financial services sector.

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May 28, 2026