Top 5 Global Ownership Data Providers

Picking the wrong ownership data provider is a compliance failure waiting to happen. 

Regulators don't accept "our vendor said so" as an audit trail, and bad actors don't restructure ownership slowly. If your onboarding stack can't produce a time-stamped, primary-source ownership record at the point of query, you have a gap. 

This guide cuts through the vendor noise to assess the five providers that matter, against the only criteria that count under FATF Recommendation 10: independence, reliability, and verified provenance. If you're building or reviewing a KYB workflow, this is where to start. 

What is Global Ownership Data?

Global ownership data is structured, machine-readable information on corporate ownership. It's extracted from source documents – PDF company extracts, shareholder registers, beneficial ownership disclosures, Articles of Association, annual accounts – and normalised into usable form. At its core, it covers corporate structure and entity relationships. It can also include data on Politically Exposed Persons, sanctions, and adverse media. 

How We Evaluated the Top 5 Global Ownership Data Providers

The test is FATF Recommendation 10: ownership data used to verify a beneficial owner must come from "independent, reliable sources". Everything else follows from that. 

Depth

Depth measures how far a provider can trace an ownership chain through corporate layers and across borders. The number that matters is not how many layers get resolved, but how. There are two ways: 

• Registry traversal: Follows the chain through live registry queries. It produces clean, auditable provenance. It's bounded by what registries disclose. 

• Cross-jurisdictional inference: Finds ownership evidence in third-country filings, trade records, property registers, and securities disclosures. It reaches further, but the source is no longer an official ownership record. A Honduran filing that reveals the shareholder of a BVI entity might be evidence, but it's not primary verification. 

For FATF Recommendation 10 purposes, these are different standards. The providers in this guide with the greatest depth are also the ones whose ownership evidence is hardest to present as primary-source verification. 

Coverage

Coverage is how many jurisdictions return meaningful, structured ownership data. 

Any credible provider covers the UK, EU member states, the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. The second tier is where compliance risk concentrates: China, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the UAE, and other jurisdictions where disclosure requirements are limited, registry access is restricted, or data quality is poor. That second tier is where providers separate from each other. 

The Chartis RiskTech Quadrant

The Chartis RiskTech Quadrant for KYC Data and Solutions is the closest thing this industry has to an authoritative external benchmark. 

Chartis Research is a specialist risk technology firm. Its annual quadrant evaluates providers against a defined methodology covering product completeness, market potential, data quality, technical capability, and strategic execution. 

The 2025 edition assessed twelve vendors. Being listed means a provider has reached a meaningful scale and capability threshold. Being named a Category Leader means high scores across both breadth of offering and ability to execute. 

Regulators expect documented, objective justification for vendor selection. An independent third-party assessment is one defensible way to provide it. 

Reliability: How Fresh Is the Data?

Under FATF Recommendation 10, reliability means one thing: the data must be fresh enough to be trusted. Bad actors restructure ownership quickly. A record accurate six months ago may have since been deliberately falsified. Compliance teams must be able to answer: when was this record retrieved, and from what source? 

There are two architectures, and they produce different answers. 

• Live retrieval: Sends a request directly to the registry at the point of query. The registry returns what it currently holds. The record is time-stamped at retrieval. 

• Database retrieval: Ingests registry data on a schedule, holds it in a warehouse, and serves queries against that warehouse. 

Reliability also depends on the registry itself. Some registries store what companies file without checking it. The better registries are tightening up: Singapore's ACRA struck off 50,000 entities for non-compliance in 2024. Companies House introduced mandatory director identity verification from November 2025. Denmark and Estonia have integrated their registries with tax and law enforcement databases. 

When a provider retrieves live data from a registry that actively verifies submissions, you get a record that's both fresh and government-verified. When a provider retrieves from a warehouse updated last week, you may not get either. 

Independence: Does It Come from Registries?

Independence means the data cannot originate from vague, third-party sources, least of all the customer. FATF Recommendation 10 requires ownership data to come from government databases, not self-declarations. 

A provider that connects directly to a government registry at the point of query is independent in the clearest sense. Those that aggregate from multiple registries, normalise and store the data in a warehouse, introducing an intermediate layer. 

The problem sharpens when a provider relies substantially on commercial data sources. D&B's DUNS model is the clearest case: many company records originate from companies self-registering with D&B. The registry layer is real, but it sits on top of self-reported commercial data. That's not independent in the FATF sense. 

This matters because when a regulator asks where an ownership record came from, "it came from our data provider" is not an answer. "It came from Companies House on this date" actually is. 

The Top 5 Providers

1. Moody's (Orbis / UBO Discovery / Maxsight)

Best for: Tier 1 banks and large financial institutions that need breadth, depth, and workflow integration in one platform. 

• Independence: Partial. UBO Discovery uses live registry connections. Orbis aggregates 170+ sources with variable provenance. 

• Reliability: Partial. UBO Discovery retrieves live, time-stamped documents. Orbis is a warehouse updated on a cycle. 

• Coverage: 200 jurisdictions, 625 million+ entities. 

• Depth: Best in class. 1.9 billion ownership links. Cross-jurisdictional inference via Maxsight fills gaps where registries are silent. 

• Chartis: Category Leader in both KYC Data and KYC Solutions in 2025. 

Moody's comprises three products, not one, and they do different things. Orbis is a warehouse: comprehensive and built for analysis, not live retrieval. UBO Discovery is architecturally closer to Kyckr, with direct registry connections and time-stamped outputs. Maxsight uses AI and graph analytics to resolve ownership through layers that no single registry reveals. The strength is depth. The complexity is that provenance varies by product. Compliance teams need to know which product produced which record.

2. Kyckr

Best for: Medium to high-risk onboarding or global financial institutions and law firms where FATF Recommendation 10 compliance is non-negotiable. 

• Independence: Sourced exclusively from government registries. 

• Reliability: Live retrieval at the point of request and time-stamped. 

• Coverage: 300 registries, 200 million entities, 100 countries. 

• Depth: Registry traversal across 300+ sources. UBO chains resolved in real time. 

• Chartis: Category Leader in 2025, receiving the highest scores for corporate structure (5.5) and entity relationships (5.5). 

Kyckr's architecture is built differently from every other provider here. Data is not stored. It's retrieved at the point of query, direct from the registry, returned with a named source and timestamp. That's the only model that cleanly meets both the independence and reliability tests. 

The limitation is structural: depth is bounded by what registries disclose. Where a jurisdiction doesn't require UBO publication, or where ownership passes through an opaque offshore vehicle, Kyckr can only follow the chain as far as the official record goes.

3. Dun & Bradstreet

Best for: Credit risk, supplier due diligence, and lower-risk onboarding. Not the first choice where FATF Recommendation 10 provenance will be scrutinised. 

• Independence: Partial. Registry data is included, but the DUNS model has self-reported data at its foundation. 

• Reliability: Partial. Ownership data is updated daily, but held in a database, not retrieved live. 

• Coverage: 190 countries, 500 million entities. 

• Depth: Moderate, with limited penetration of opaque offshore structures. 

• Chartis: Category Leader in 2025. 

D&B blends registry sources with its DUNS network, which has self-reported company information at its core. The registry layer is real. So is the limitation: where registries are thin or a company has never engaged with D&B, the data may simply be absent. D&B's own documentation states it does not verify ownership information beyond what registries provide. For lower-risk, transparent-jurisdiction onboarding at scale, D&B performs well. For complex or high-risk structures, the provenance question is hard to answer cleanly for a regulator. 

4. LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Best for: Enterprise compliance programmes that need ownership data integrated with sanctions, adverse media, and PEP checks. Best deployed alongside a registry-first provider rather than as a standalone verification tool. 

• Independence: Partial. Draws on public records and registries but is aggregated with proprietary linking and third-party sources. 

• Reliability: Database model. Continuous monitoring feeds, but not live registry retrieval for ownership. 

• Coverage: 200 countries, 2.5 billion identities. 

• Depth: Strong, particularly good on PEPs, adverse media, and sanctions linkage alongside ownership. 

• Chartis: Category Leader in 2025. 

LexisNexis is primarily a risk intelligence aggregator. Its strength is what sits alongside ownership data: sanctions, PEPs, adverse media, and linking technology that surfaces connections across seemingly unrelated entities. The ownership data itself draws partly on public registry sources, partly on D&B's UBO data, and partly on its own aggregated records. That blend produces a rich risk picture, but it complicates the independence argument: you cannot point to a single government source for each ownership record when multiple layers of aggregation have intervened. 

5. ComplyAdvantage

Best for: Fintechs and financial institutions that need continuous financial crime monitoring integrated with ownership data. Best paired with a registry-first data layer for onboarding verification. 

• Independence: Partial. KYB data graph draws on public registries and third-party sources. 

• Reliability: Continuous monitoring and real-time alert feeds, but ownership data is held in a graph database, not live-retrieved. 

• Coverage: 400 million+ companies across 200+ countries. 

• Depth: Moderate, strong on financial crime linkage and network effects. 

• Chartis: Category Leader for KYC Solutions, Best-of-Breed for KYC Data. 

ComplyAdvantage built its reputation on real-time financial crime intelligence and added KYB data to create a unified risk graph linking individuals and entities to financial crime signals. That graph is the genuine strength. The ownership data, however, is aggregated and held in a database. It's not live retrieved from registries. For firms whose primary need is financial crime signal detection, ComplyAdvantage is one of the strongest options. For firms whose auditors will ask, "Where did this ownership record come from, and when," the answer is less clean.

Which Provider Should You Use?

The honest answer is that no single provider covers every case. 

For medium to high-risk onboarding, the answer has to be a named government registry, retrieved at a specific date and time. Only live retrieval from primary sources produces that audit trail cleanly. 

That's why Kyckr sits at the top of this list for primary verification. It retrieves directly from 300+ government registries, returns a time-stamped record, and doesn't blend sources. For straightforward onboarding workflows, that's often enough. 

For complex, multi-layered, or offshore structures, Moody's Orbis and Maxsight reach further than any registry-first tool can. If your portfolio includes high-risk structures that registries won't fully illuminate, Moody's belongs alongside Kyckr, not behind it. 

Kyckr is the right foundation for primary-source onboarding. Moody's is the right tool when the structure gets complicated.