The pace, complexity, scope and automation of the corporate world is increasing fast, and is exposing a growing gap in today’s company data between what is provided and what is required. OpenCorporates’ Legal-Entity Data Principles aim to redress this.
Legal entities are the atomic elements behind the entire business world – and increasingly every other part of our lives too. How many contracts did you enter into this week – either explicitly or by agreeing to an end-user license agreement, or by installing an app on your phone?
They are also the conduits for all large-scale criminal activity, from enabling corruption, organized crime and money laundering, to their use in fraud, tax evasion and undermining democratic institutions.
Yet today’s company data is still largely built on obfuscation, proprietary identifiers, opaque data models, hidden bias and restrictive access — and so is less and less able to provide the insight, capability and trust that business and society requires to combat these threats.
That approach – if it ever was fit for purpose – certainly isn’t today, when the need for accurate, provenanced and transparent legal entity data is a requirement for everything from knowing who you’re doing business with, to understanding global supply chains and tackling all manner of evils from corruption to the fast-growing crime-as-a-service sector. It’s also critical as we move into the new world of automated transactions and artificial intelligence.
It’s time to move on, and say enough is enough.
Today we hope this will mark a step change……
Drawing on over a decade of experience working solely in legal-entity data, OpenCorporates has formulated a set of principles that provide a framework for closing the trust gap.
To be clear, these should be principles not just for OpenCorporates, but for anybody operating in this area, so we’re releasing them under an open licence, to enable anyone to use them, even our competitors.
Capturing and curating good legal-entity data is a complex task that requires diligence and rigor. These principles reflect that: they’re aspirational and statements of intent, to which we’re committed. Perfection is a destination never reached, but we can set these as our direction and report transparently on our success achieving them.
We believe the principles provide a framework of verifiable trust in and the decisions behind the data, and create new benchmarks for foundational data in this domain.
We’ve been sharing these with a number of partners before launching, but now we’d love to hear from the wider community.
You can read the full details of our Legal Entity Data Principles here.
The Principles:
- Foundational data comes from primary sources
- Hidden bias is a silent killer
- Only full audit trails give the trust and utility users need
- Good standards reduce friction
- Today’s world needs real-time data
- Data quality needs a dataset perspective
- Open is an essential component of data quality
We are living through a tumultuous period, technologically, politically and economically — a time when the very prosperity, fairness and sustainability of our society feels uncertain.
Yet one thing is clear: without ready access to accurate, dependable and trustworthy legal-entity data — the information that ultimately tells us who we’re dealing with — the future will be bleak.
