Developing the world's first transnational open beneficial ownership register: A brief history of the Open Ownership Register
Conclusion
The world needs transnational approaches to collecting, combining, and using BO data now more than ever.
Globally, only 9% of countries effectively implement BO legislation, according to a 2022 stocktake by the FATF, while the OECD Global Forum reports that only 5% of countries have been rated compliant with their Element A.1, which assesses the BO requirements on legal entities and arrangements.
A huge amount of work is still needed across the world to make effective use of BO data. Grand corruption tends to involve transnational money flows and therefore calls for cross-border investigations. To do this effectively, BO data must not only be available in different countries, but must also be interoperable so that it can be linked and analysed with other relevant datasets. This includes using reliable identifiers for people and companies in the datasets as well as reliable and comprehensive dates so that data users or analysts can determine who owned or controlled what and when.
Over seven years, Open Ownership has sought to show how to operationalise and iterate on the usage of standardised and interoperable BO data. Combined with the insights gleaned from our work supporting the implementation of BO reforms across the globe, the OO Register helped drive forward the development of our data standard as well as our research and other technology efforts.
Open Ownership’s goal remains the same – to help people collect high-quality BO data and make sure it is well used. However, we are shifting how we do this: moving away from running the OO Register, we are instead investing more time and resources to scale up our work in other areas – driving adoption of BODS, conducting data analysis, and supporting others to harness the power of BO data.