How to Access Shareholder Information for KYB and UBO Verification
Understanding who truly controls a company requires more than surface-level data taken from beneficial ownership registers.
According to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), it requires a multi-pronged approach using multiple official sources. This includes underlying shareholder information.
However, accessing this data presents significant challenges. According to Open Ownership, 99 countries maintain UBO registers. But many lack public access or rely solely on self-reporting mechanisms that sophisticated criminals exploit.
Moreover, each jurisdiction offers different levels of transparency and accessibility.
This comprehensive guide explores where to find shareholder data, the obstacles financial crime professionals face, and why a multi-pronged verification approach is essential for robust due diligence in modern financial crime prevention.
What is Shareholder Information?
Shareholder information shows which people and businesses own or control parts of another business, either through shares or voting rights.
This information is usually found in self-disclosed company filings on official registers.
UK: Found in Confirmation Statements and Returns of Allotment of Shares.
New Zealand: Found in Particulars of Shareholding and Annual Returns.
What is Shareholder Data?
Shareholder data refers to machine-readable, structured formats (JSON, XML, CSV) that can be integrated into KYB workflows and screening tools. For automated risk management, only data is truly useful.
Why is It Important in KYB?
By understanding which people and businesses own a stake in an entity, KYB analysts can identify the person who ultimately controls it or derives the most benefit from its existence – also known as the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO). The stakes are high.
Example: In 2022, Danske Bank was fined €2.1B after failing to identify beneficial owners hidden behind shell companies. Shareholder data, if properly structured, could have prevented that.
Why UBO Registers Aren’t Enough
While 99 countries have live UBO registers, they only go so far.
Many don’t provide public access, have limited verification powers, or rely solely on self-reporting.
The UK: The People with Significant Control (PSC) register is public, but UK guidance explicitly says that it cannot be considered as the ultimate source of truth on who is a PSC.
As the FATF states, KYB analysts must use a “multi-pronged approach” to beneficial ownership verification because criminals often use sophisticated methods of obscuring the real UBO by using shell companies to own tiny shares in the same entity.
In other words, the person listed on the register who owns more than 25% of an entity might not be the real beneficial owner.
Shareholder data, therefore, helps build up a true picture of a company.
Where to Access Shareholder Information
There are three ways to obtain shareholder data: via customers, official company registers, or third-party providers.
Customers: During onboarding, the regulated entity requests shareholder information from the customer directly. This manual process is time-consuming and often inconvenient, leading to a back-and-forth that results in high levels of customer attrition.
Official Registries: Regulated entities must use official company registers as they provide what the FATF calls “independent and reliable” information. However, only New Zealand’s Companies Office provides shareholder data in machine-readable text; the rest provide it in PDF form, making UBO verification a cumbersome, manual process.
Third-party Providers: The best KYB data providers extract shareholder information from company filings and turn it into machine-readable data, but they differ on the freshness of that data. Some, such as Open Corporates, periodically download vast datasets from official registers. Others, such as Kyckr, provide live API access to 300+ company registers.
Which Countries Provide Shareholder Information?
The majority of official corporate registers hold shareholder data, but the registers differ on what information is visible, who gets to access it, and how that information can be accessed.
The UK: Provides publicly available information on shareholders via downloadable PDF company filings and PSCs on the Persons of Significant Control register. However, UK guidance states that using the PSC register isn’t enough for UBO verification.
US: Access to shareholder information differs by state. Alaska, for example, makes shareholder data publicly available while Delaware doesn’t. Since April 2025, US companies are not obliged to disclose their UBO.
EU: EU countries differ widely. In Cyprus, shareholder data must be obtained in person. In Belgium, shareholder registers are private. Since November 2024, all shareholders associated with Luxembourg companies must obtain a national identification number (CRN). Most EU countries have beneficial ownership registers accessible only to law enforcement.
The UAE: The UAE has a closed system for shareholder information, which must be requested from local registration authorities, such as a Dubai Free Zone.
Asia: Both in Singapore and Hong Kong, shareholder data is available, but it’s extremely limited. Many companies use nominee shareholders and directors to obscure ownership, rendering the data difficult to parse.
What Shareholder Information is Available?
The information differs from country to country and depends on whether the person’s stake is above 25%.
Name: The shareholder’s personal name is listed. However, few registries distinguish between people with similar names.
Address: In the UK, residential addresses are shown for entities or persons that own more than 25%. In other registries, such as Hong Kong, the business address is to be listed instead.
Date of Birth: Some registries, such as Companies House, list the full date of birth, but others, due to privacy concerns, only list the month and year.
Identification Number: Some registries, such as Luxembourg, provide numbers that identify the unique person. Recently, Singapore and Hong Kong have removed these due to privacy concerns.
Shareholding Type: In the UK, for example, ‘ordinary’ or ‘preferred’ shares are listed, which have a crucial difference: ordinary shares confer voting rights, while preferred shares don’t.
Example: How to Access Shareholder Information in the UK
Website: Go to the website of Companies House.
Start a Search: Conduct a free search on Companies House.
Select Company: Select the company you’re investigating.
Find Documents: Click ‘Filing History’.
Refine: Select ‘Confirmation Statement’.
View: You will see the shareholding listed by the company name, amount, and the type of shareholding. E.g., ordinary or preferred.
Shareholder Data: Challenges and Bottlenecks
1. Cumbersome Manual Processes
Most shareholder information available on official company registers must be obtained manually, with only New Zealand offering machine-readable shareholder data.
Problem: Financial crime professionals must extract, structure and normalise the data from the filings themselves, adding a layer of technical complexity to due diligence.
2. Nominee Shareholders Obscure True Ownership
In many cases, a nominee shareholder is listed instead of the real shareholder. While countries such as Estonia have banned this practice, it’s perfectly legal in world-leading registers such as Singapore, New Zealand, and the UK.
Example: Singapore enables nominee shareholders, while publicly stating their status as a nominee. However, the identity of nominators is only available to law enforcement.
3. Threshold Manipulation
Sophisticated criminals hide the true ownership of an entity by distributing shares piecemeal among a web of shell companies and nominees, so no single individual holds the FATF’s recommended 25% threshold.
Problem: In New Zealand’s Companies Office, only major shareholders are listed, which means that bad actors can exploit the system by distributing shares across multiple nominee shareholders to obscure ownership.
4. Multiple Entries of the Same Name Obscure Ownership
It’s sometimes difficult to identify individual shareholders because potentially thousands of people might share their name, or they might use variations of their name.
Example: There are 494,831 entries for “John Smith” on the UK’s Companies House.
Registries handle this problem differently.
Luxembourg: All shareholders connected to Luxembourg-registered entities must have a unique individual identifier (CRN).
Hong Kong: Key personal identifiers, such as birth dates, addresses, or unique ID numbers, have been removed from public filings since December 2023.
New Zealand: Introducing corporate role-holder identifier (CRI) numbers, similar to the DINs of Australia.
5. Lack of Verification
Registries rarely verify the self-reported information submitted to them by companies because they lack the funding and resources to do so. As such, the information can be outdated, inaccurate, or even purposefully falsified. However, more registers are becoming gatekeepers, not simply archivists.
Singapore: Monitors corporate service providers holding multiple directorships and verifies the identity of shareholders.
Hong Kong: Disqualified entities and sanction lists are cross-referenced at registration.
The UK: Mandatory verification of shareholders in autumn 2025 will make it easier to identify the real individual and their connections to different entities.
Why Turn to Third-Party Providers
As Transparency International states, third-party data vendors play an indispensable role in business verification because they do what official registries can’t.
Multiple Access Points: They aggregate official data from multiple sources, enabling cross-border verification that stand-alone registries lack.
Data Extraction: KYB data providers, such as Middesk and Kyckr, extract shareholder data from company filings, saving analysts lots of time.
Thresholds: Some third-party vendors, such as Kyckr, enable analysts to set thresholds themselves, thereby identifying all shareholders, allowing for the swift identification of shell companies.
API Access Versus Database
It’s important to choose the right KYB data provider to serve your risk appetite. As we’ve seen, there are two kinds:
Live Access: Some KYB providers, such as Kyckr or Middesk, have live access to official company registers worldwide, using API integrations. This means the data is up-to-date at the point of request.
Database: Other KYB providers, such as Open Corporates, have databases periodically refreshed with shareholder data from global company registers.
Live Access to Shareholder Data in 300+ Jurisdictions
Shareholder data is the bedrock of UBO verification, but it’s hard to access, and even harder to embed in workflows because it’s rarely presented in machine-readable text.
As a result, financial crime professionals must manually extract shareholder info from company filings, which adds significant friction to the onboarding process.
Kyckr, the global business register, does it for you. With live access to 300+ official company registers all over the world, Kyckr extracts shareholder data in real time from company documents, normalising it and structuring it in a machine-readable format.
While registries store shareholder data, and databases aggregate it, only live API integrations like Kyckr’s make it operational at scale for financial crime prevention.
Book a demo to find out more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is shareholder information public?
It depends on the jurisdiction. In the UK, Companies House makes shareholder names and shareholdings publicly available, though not always in real time. In Singapore, personal identifiers (like ID numbers) have been removed in recent years. Access levels vary widely, which is why firms rely on live, direct-register feeds to get reliable shareholder data for KYB.
What’s the difference between shareholder information and shareholder data?
Shareholder information usually refers to human-readable formats like PDFs or scanned filings. Shareholder data refers to machine-readable, structured formats (JSON, XML, CSV) that can be integrated into KYB workflows and screening tools. For automated risk management, only data is truly useful.
How is shareholder data different from Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) data?
Shareholders are the legal owners of shares in a company, while UBOs are the individuals who ultimately control or benefit from the company, even if they hold shares through other entities or nominees. UBO registers are designed to reveal hidden ownership, but they’re often incomplete or unreliable. Shareholder data, taken directly from official registers, is the building block for accurate UBO identification.
Which jurisdictions have the best shareholder data?
The UK, Denmark, and several Nordic countries offer relatively high levels of shareholder transparency. Others, such as Luxembourg or Hong Kong, restrict access to identifiers or only provide shareholder snapshots at specific filing dates. In the US, shareholder data is rarely available through state registers at all.
How can banks and KYB providers access shareholder data at scale?
Manually pulling PDFs from individual company registers is inefficient and often incomplete. Aggregator platforms can help, but are limited by static data dumps. The only way to integrate shareholder data effectively into onboarding and monitoring is through live API connections to official company registers – Kyckr’s speciality.