The 10 Most Reliable Company Registries in 2026
Company registries have a reputation for being passive repositories of company information. But this is changing.
All over the world, regulators and governments are giving registries new powers to remove dormant companies, strike off noncompliant ones, and improve overall data quality.
We wanted to know which company registry offers the highest-quality data. Here are the results.
Methodology
We measured the quality of registry data based on five factors:
Is the data verified?
Are natural persons given a unique identifier?
Does the registrar actively enforce compliance and delete noncompliant entries?
Is the registry transparent about the use of nominees?
Is the data available via API?
1. Verified Data
According to the Business Register Insights 2024 report, 71.1% of registries verify company filings by consulting, accessing and connecting to other data sources, such as official sanctions watchlists, tax databases, and population registries.
This is fast becoming the norm. Increasingly, registries are not passively recording information given to them but actively checking whether the information is accurate. Company data from such registries is, by definition, better data.
Method: We ranked registries based on whether they verified the identities of shareholders and directors, used analytics to monitor suspicious activity, or cross-referenced company data with other government databases.
2. Unique Identifiers
Unique identifiers for individuals make it easier to locate natural persons linked to entities. Without a unique ID, “John Smith” is difficult to trace.
Method: We ranked registries based on whether they had unique identifiers for individuals.
3. Active Registrars
Company data from active registrars – that is, registries that actively enforce compliance and delete noncompliant entities – tends to be higher quality. The registrar, in effect, acts as a first-line sieve of low-quality data from dormant companies and dodgy businesses.
Method: We considered the enforcement patterns of registries.
4. Nominee Transparency
This one is important but often overlooked. In some countries, the use of nominee shareholders – people who, on paper, take the place of the real owner of a legal entity – is banned. This instantly makes it easier to tell whether the data can be trusted.
Method: ‘Nominee transparency’ was ranked based on whether the country requires nominees to be publicly disclosed, or whether nominees are banned outright.
5. Usability
In practice, inaccessible data is worthless to KYB professionals and researchers. If the data is locked in PDFs, it must be extracted, structured and normalised, adding hours and days onto due diligence workflows.
Method: In this study, ‘usability’ was ranked based on the number of publicly available APIs and bulk datasets.
Which Registries Have the Most Reliable Company Data?
1. ACRA (Singapore)
Verified Data ✅
Uses Unique Identifiers ✅
Active Registrar ✅
Nominee Transparency ✅
Usability ✅
Singapore’s Accounting and Regulatory Authority (ACRA) is world-leading.
Directors are linked by unique identifiers. A dedicated analytics unit monitors anomalous activity among corporate service providers, and the nominee status of a shareholder must be publicly disclosed.
ACRA has also been ramping up enforcement against noncompliant businesses, significantly increasing the number of strike-off actions.
2. E-Business Register (Estonia)
Verified Data ✅
Uses Unique Identifiers ✅
Active Registrar ✅
Nominee Transparency ✅
Usability ✅
Estonia’s E-Business Register is a gatekeeper of truth.
Enforcement actions for noncompliance have increased significantly since 2023, after the amendment to the Business Register Act.
Not only is the use of nominee shareholders a criminal offence, but the identities of those shareholders are also verified. They’re more easily traced, too. Every person linked to an entity – shareholders, directors, officers – is given an isikukood, an 11-digit personal identification code.
3. Companies House (UK)
Verified Data ✅
Uses Unique Identifiers ✅
Active Registrar ✅
Nominee Transparency ❌
Usability ✅
Companies House has been increasing data quality since the rollout of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, which empowered the registrar.
The identity of directors and Persons of Significant Control (PSC) is verified, and each is given a unique personal code that identifies them from all the other John Smiths in Britain.
Companies House has also been clamping down on noncompliance. 11,500 companies were specifically struck off as part of a crackdown coordinated by the National Economic Crime Centre, and between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025, Companies House queried or removed instances of false, misleading, or inaccurate information from registers relating to 106,300 companies.
4. CVR (Denmark)
Verified Data ✅
Uses Unique Identifiers ✅
Active Registrar ✅
Nominee Transparency ❌
Usability ✅
Denmark’s registrar, the CVR, clearly removes noncompliant businesses. After introducing new beneficial ownership requirements, it removed roughly 7,500 noncompliant entities.
The data is also automatically verified. Verification is ‘built in’.
Anyone who makes a UBO declaration must use a government ID, which in turn is connected to multiple government databases. Even foreign owners undergo automated checks upon registration.
5. CBE (Belgium)
Verified Data 🔶
Uses Unique Identifiers ✅
Active Registrar ✅
Nominee Transparency ❌
Usability ✅
The Crossroads Bank for Enterprises, Belgium’s company registry, has some verification built in from the start.
Each natural person connected to a legal entity receives a unique identifier – a Belgian National Register number for residents, and a BIS number for non-residents. This number, in turn, connects to multiple government databases, meaning that when someone’s address changes, it is automatically reflected in the CBE data.
In fact, the register’s IT system has been lauded as extremely sophisticated. Since 2022, it has automatically detected inconsistencies in UBO submissions.
This has helped the CBE become more active in recent years. In February 2024, 21,000 entities were instantly struck off the register ‘ex officio’ for noncompliance with beneficial ownership laws.
6. ASIC (Australia)
Verified Data 🔶
Uses Unique Identifiers ✅
Active Registrar ✅
Nominee Transparency ❌
Usability ✅
ASIC – the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – is certainly taking on the role of ‘gatekeeper’.
It rounded off 2025 with the most successful enforcement crackdown in its history, with a 50% rise in investigations and an 20% increase in civil enforcement proceedings.
It’s easy to identify specific individuals. ASIC pioneered the use of unique identifiers for individuals, cross-referencing these DIN numbers with information from other government databases to ensure compliance.
This only applies to directors, however. Shareholders needn’t verify their identity or have a DIN number, unlike Estonia and the UK.
7. Infogreffe (France)
Verified Data ❌
Uses Unique Identifiers ❌
Active Registrar ✅
Nominee Transparency ✅
Usability ✅
Infogreffe, the French registry, has become more active in recent years. The number of automatic strike-offs – mostly a result of administrative compliance failings – increased by 88% in 2025.
The hundreds of court registrars also monitor discrepancies, which is a step in the right direction.
However, Infogreffe has a long way to go. While the use of nominee shareholders is against the law, France doesn’t have mandatory identity verification of directors or shareholders. Neither does it use unique identifiers, preventing it from ensuring timeliness and freshness like its neighbour, Belgium’s CBE.
8. Companies Office (New Zealand)
Verified Data 🔶
Uses Unique Identifiers ❌
Active Registrar ✅
Nominee Transparency ❌
Usability ✅
Companies Office is also increasingly cleaning up its data, with enforcement actions increasing against noncompliant businesses.
But it’s still behind Singapore, Britain, Estonia, and Denmark.
Directors – not shareholders – have their identities verified, but they don’t receive a unique identifier (although there are plans to introduce a Corporate Role Holder Identifier, like Australia’s DIN number).
9. The LBR (Luxembourg)
Verified Data ❌
Uses Unique Identifiers ✅
Active Registrar ❌
Nominee Transparency ❌
Usability ✅
Luxembourg has just begun its transition from ‘librarian’ to ‘gatekeeper’ – as early as December 2025, when the LBR announced plans to start verifying new submissions with automated checks, cross-referencing them with other government databases.
The effect remains to be seen. This reform package was prompted by significant noncompliance with filing requirements. One estimate states that the enforcement backlog will take 3 years to clear.
Some credit is due. The LBR recently launched its API, and every natural person – even non-residents – is given a National Identifier Number.
10. CR (Hong Kong)
Verified Data ✅
Uses Unique Identifiers ❌
Active Registrar ✅
Nominee Transparency ❌
Usability ❌
The CR does appear to actively enforce compliance with corporate filing obligations, but the data is minimal.
What we do know: The registry automatically cross-references individual names against sanctions and disqualified entity lists during registration – an immediate data quality check.
It also verifies the identities of directors. However, it scrapped unique identifiers for individuals in 2023 due to privacy concerns, making the verification less effective.
300+ Company Registries, in One Place
The picture that emerges is one of genuine progress.
Registries that once passively recorded whatever they were told are now cross-referencing, enforcing, and striking off.
But even the best registries have blind spots. For compliance teams operating across multiple markets, the quality of any single registry matters far less than the ability to see across all of them. The more registries you can see into, the fewer places there are to hide.
This is what Kyckr provides.
Rather than maintaining a static database, Kyckr connects directly to over 300 official company registries in real time, pulling structured, normalised data at the point of request.
The registries ranked here represent the gold standard of official company data.
Kyckr gives compliance teams direct access to all of them (and hundreds more).