Evolving from the Open Ownership Register to increase our impact

Photo by Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash

The more connected and comparable beneficial ownership (BO) information is, the more impactful it can be in tackling corruption and financial crime. In 2017, Open Ownership initiated an experiment: the Open Ownership Register, our prototype transnational, open BO register.

This experiment was pioneering. We led the way in developing a transnational BO register, connecting BO data from registries around the world. Seven years on, the Open Ownership Register has successfully catalysed market change, and it’s time to evolve our approach and focus on more systemic global impact.

From 29 November 2024, users will no longer be able to visit register.openownership.org. The main Open Ownership website, our bulk datasets, and all our other tech products will remain available as normal. Read on to find out more about why we’re making this shift and what comes next!

“Linking BO data transnationally is key to unlocking its impact. This shift will ensure we deliver more sustainable and systemic progress to realise the goal of globally interconnected and standardised BO data to fight corruption and end financial crime.” – Thom Townsend, Executive Director at Open Ownership

The impact of using beneficial ownership data

Launched in April 2017 with funding from the UK government, the Open Ownership Register has helped people use BO data by standardising and connecting over 30 million BO records featuring over 11 million companies and listing owners from over 200 jurisdictions.

Data from the Open Ownership Register has been used in multiple investigations, such as the Bottle Laundromat and the Beirut explosion, and civil society organisations have benefited from accessing our easy-to-use bulk datasets and analysis tools.

Crucially, when the Open Ownership Register website closes, we will continue to make the existing data available, ensuring the potential for future impact is not lost. We are sharing the technical information and lessons we learned from developing the Register. The code which powered the Register will also remain available and reusable via the Open Ownership GitHub account, so others can continue to build on and use the concepts and technology we developed for the Register.

Shifting our focus upstream to change the global data landscape

When the Open Ownership Register was first conceived in 2016, BO transparency was a fairly new policy area, and Open Ownership pioneered linking publicly available BO data transnationally. Since then, this work has helped catalyse many more actors to enter the market.

Through our partnerships with tech companies such as Microsoft, GraphAware, OpenSanctions, and the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation, the Open Ownership Register has served as a leading demonstration of what can be done, how to do it, and the value of connecting BO data transnationally. Companies like these are incorporating our technologies and datasets into their products, and using them to help consumers better use BO data at scale.

While there is great value to the work we have done in the Register, the technical overhead is significant. This overhead is increasing as the policy and technical landscape is evolving to allow greater precision and control over what data is shared, with whom, and why. Closing the Open Ownership Register allows us to refocus more of our resources.

Open Ownership’s unique value-add is our expertise in supporting these partners and others to standardise and structure data so that it can be readily incorporated into their tools. As we evolve, we are leaning into this expertise and expanding our role as a catalyst for systemic change.

What’s next?

Demand for globally linkable BO data is rapidly increasing – to fight illicit financial flows, tackle transnational corruption, and prevent tax evasion. We are expanding our work to drive forward policy, technology, and data changes at the global and regional levels that will deliver on this demand.

We are accelerating our work on the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard – the de facto global standard for exchanging BO information and linking it transnationally – and increasing our bespoke technical support to countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and to technology companies and data users, to realise impact from BO data.

Open Ownership is innovating new approaches to advocate for change at the international level to ensure that transnational BO data is available to those who need it. We recently launched a new tech experiment to build a tool that will demonstrate, with real-world data, the time and resource savings governments can realise from searching multiple accessible BO registers from a single place. We will share more on this soon.

It’s an exciting time for Open Ownership as we adapt and evolve, striving for bigger and better impact at the global and local levels. If you have any questions or want to learn more about this work, please email us via [email protected].