Is There a European Company Registry?
No single European company registry or database exists. Each member state runs its own.
The EU has built infrastructure to connect them: BRIS links all 27 national registers and tells you a company exists, but not who owns or controls it. BORIS was designed to fill that gap, connecting national beneficial ownership registers across the bloc, but it isn't operational and won't be for several years.
This guide explains why, what the alternatives are, and what it means for KYB across European jurisdictions.
Is there a European company registry?
BRIS
BRIS (Business Registers Interconnection System) lives on the European e-Justice Portal. It's free, it's live, and it queries national registers in real time across all 27 member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.
To use it, go to the portal, search by company name or number, refine by country, and you'll get the entity name, registered office, registration number, company type, and status.
What you won't get: shareholders, directors, UBOs, financial statements, or anything that helps you understand who controls the thing.
For a one-off existence check, it does the job. For KYB at any meaningful scale, it doesn't, because there's no API, no programmatic access, and no way to feed the data into a compliance workflow without doing it by hand. BRIS was built to confirm that companies exist. It was not built for due diligence.
BORIS
BORIS (Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System) was designed to do for beneficial ownership what BRIS does for company existence: connect national registers and provide live cross-border access to UBO data.
It's not operational. The reason explains a lot.
On 22 November 2022, the CJEU struck down open public access to beneficial ownership registers. The court found that the AML Directive's provision, which allows any member of the public access to UBO data, was a disproportionate interference with the right to privacy under the EU Charter. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg suspended public access to their UBO registers the same day.
BORIS was still being constructed when the ruling landed. The access model around which it was built had just been ruled unlawful. It remains unfinished.
The 6AMLD and the EU's 2024 AML package are meant to fix this. Obliged entities retain the right to access UBO information for customer due diligence; the regulation is clear on that point.
What remains unclear is the form BORIS will take in practice. Open Ownership raised the obvious question in their 2024 analysis: will UBO data spread across multiple member states be integrated into a single view, or will compliance teams be left to piece it together themselves? Will access be API-based, or manual and portal-driven? No answer yet.
The problem underneath both systems
Even if BRIS and BORIS worked perfectly, they wouldn't resolve the more fundamental issue: European company data is fragmented at source.
Each of the 27 member states runs its own register, with its own legal forms, its own disclosure requirements, and its own update schedule. There's no single EU-wide company identifier. Financial statements might be filed with the register, or with a separate body, or not required at all, depending on the country and the company's size. The legal vocabulary alone (GmbH, SARL, SRL, Sp. z o.o., NV) varies enough to create verification problems for teams unfamiliar with local forms.
For anyone onboarding businesses across multiple European jurisdictions, this means navigating 27 separate portals, each with its own rules and costs. That's the operational reality that the EU's interconnection systems are trying to address. They haven't fully addressed it yet.
Is there a European company database?
Sort of. The EU's Open Data Directive created a list of high-value datasets that member states must publish in machine-readable format, accessible via API and available for bulk download. One of the six categories is companies. So, in principle, yes: a European company database exists.
In practice, "database" overstates it. What you have is 27 national datasets published under a common framework, with no standardised update frequency and no enforcement mechanism for how current the data needs to be.
Kyckr's audit of EU Open Data company datasets (20 May 2026) found the following:
Ireland's Companies Registration Office: updated daily (excluding weekends).
Italy: updated monthly.
Malta: last updated sometime in 2025.
The regulation requires data to be available "in its most current version." It leaves the refresh cadence to member states, to be defined in line with their own company registration processes. That's a framework for inconsistency, not a remedy for it.
For a compliance team running KYB across multiple European jurisdictions, this matters. A dataset that was current yesterday in Dublin may be a year out of date in Valletta. You can't build a reliable onboarding workflow on data whose freshness you can't predict or verify.
What fragmentation looks like in practice
France
Infogreffe, France's registry portal, is entirely in French with no English translation. Shareholder data exists within company filings – statutes and capital event records –, but it isn't surfaced as structured data anywhere on the portal or through any of the available APIs. Retrieving it means purchasing and reading individual documents per company, in French. UBO access requires proving legitimate interest through a separate process. A complete KYB pack costs €73.44. At any scale, verifying French ownership structures is a document-by-document manual exercise.
Germany
Germany runs three registers: the Handelsregister, the Unternehmensregister, and the Transparenzregister, each with overlapping but inconsistent data. The Handelsregister alone sits across 150 separate local court registrars. Filings are unstructured PDF scans – some are images – and neither register offers structured data via API. Documents cost between €4.50 and €12.50 each; basic search is free. Beneficial ownership is restricted to German obliged entities. Foreign institutions can apply under a legitimate interest route, but the framework is narrow and slow, and as of September 2025, the European Commission had brought legal action against Germany for failing to provide proper cross-border access.
The Netherlands
The KVK Handelsregister is among the more modern EU registries: it has four APIs and extracts documents available in English and Dutch. The limitations are in ownership. The KVK shows only the main shareholder in company filings; all other shareholders are held in a private register at the company itself. A bulk open data set exists but is fully anonymised — no company names, no KVK numbers. UBO data is currently restricted to Dutch competent authorities and nationally obliged entities, with access for overseas entities and a UBO API both expected from 2026, though the access rules are not yet finalised.
Spain
The Registro Mercantil requires no account for a basic search, but returns only name, status, and region. Everything useful – registration date, directors, financial information, beneficial ownership – sits behind a paid excerpt that requires identity verification via a Spanish digital certificate or passport number and phone number. Shareholder data is extremely limited. The portal caps the results at 100; the portal is in Spanish, and when Kyckr's team accessed it in February 2026, the English translation was incomplete.
Italy
The Registro delle Imprese is managed by Infocamere, a consortium of local chambers of commerce operating under the oversight of a judge and the Ministry of Economic Development. Every detailed record requires payment, and downloaded documents expire after 30 days. The beneficial ownership register has been suspended since 2024 following legal challenges referred to the CJEU, leaving Italy's central source of UBO data in indefinite legal limbo. Verifying who controls an Italian entity currently means extracting and interpreting shareholder data from company filings by hand.
Where this leaves you
The EU AML package of April 2024 (AMLD6, the AML Regulation, and the AMLA Regulation) is heading in the right direction: a single EU-level AML authority, harmonised customer due diligence requirements, and an eventual resolution to the BORIS access question. That's the trajectory.
The timeline is measured in years. Compliance teams working now can't wait for it.
For European entity existence checks, BRIS is useful within its limits. For ownership and control, there is currently no single European registry or database that provides it. That information must come from national registers, direct registry connections, or platforms that pull live data from authoritative sources and normalise it without requiring your team to navigate each country separately.
Kyckr connects directly to company registries across 100+ countries, including across Europe. It queries live at the point of request rather than serving stored copies. Where beneficial ownership data is accessible to obliged entities, it surfaces in the same workflow. No portal-hopping, no manual normalisation.