A large US bank runs know your business (KYB) checks on every company it takes on as a customer. Opening the account is only the start. After booking, the bank has to confirm the business is active with its secretary of state, keep that answer current, and explain it later if a regulator or an internal team asks why a decision was made.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.