By creating an EU-wide product around corporate events data, derived from corporate register data in OpenCorporates.com database, and from other registers and datasets, users of this product will have access to a range of critical, standardised corporate events.
CED is an EU-wide product around standardized corporate events data across jurisdictions, derived from company registers and government gazettes. The product gives users insight into significant events in a company’s lifecycle, including changes in status name, address, directors and officers.
The Corporate Events Data Access Service (CED) from OpenCorporates is a new product which provides cross-jurisdictional data and alerts about changes in companies, deriving this from official primary sources (primarily company registers and at later stage government gazettes), and making them available in a standardized form.
Such events give critical early warning to users who need ‘signals’ about changes at companies of their interest (e.g. status, name, directors, address, industry, etc.), including Know Your Customer (KYC) and due diligence users, as a change in director or industry, for example, will often mean that KYC processes need to be refreshed. Other key users include partners of the companies (suppliers, customers, banks, trade finance companies, etc.), regulators and competitors of the companies.
This data is available to users: (a) via the website, so that users can see the events relating to a given company with a timeline of the key lifecycle points, (b) via the API, so that users can both see events for a company and also get the latest events of a given type, and (c) via bulk data.
Of those three, bulk data will bring in the greatest revenue by quite some margin – however, making the data available via the website is important for the delivery of OpenCorporates’ public-benefit mission (of making company data freely available for public benefit), as well as it is a marketing tool for the product.
This product is well aligned to our core product, moving us from ‘fresh’ snapshots to time-series of company data. Our existing clients and prospects are the target market within the KYC/AML sector, with business information providers, and financial services. Corporate events will become an important part of our product portfolio in the future, delivering growth from both new and existing clients.
Finally, the architecture we have chosen – using microservices to create events from various triggers – not only provides a maintainable and iterable system, but crucially, given the overall OpenCorporates technical roadmap, it provides a system that allows to migrate the main monolithic app to a more distributed, microservices architecture without having to change the events' elements.
Public Private Companies due diligence
Company data is critical for journalists, governments, businesses and civil society. Recently the EU has declared company data (including company registers, identifiers, and crucially data on ownership and management) will be made available as open data. Despite Company Registers being part of the public record, a number of jurisdictions charge vast sums for access to this vital data. While some Member States in Europe already make company registers available as open data (including the UK, France, Denmark, Bulgaria and Belgium), a number of European jurisdictions have pushed back.
We’ve been following and engaging closely with the directive, and we’re impressed with the commitment and understanding of many of the key actors involved. We were also helped by a large number of civil society organisations, anti-corruption NGOs, and others who recognise the importance of this data to shine a light on the corporate world, transform business integrity and help the fight against fraud, money laundering and organised crime.
OpenCorporates is collecting company registers from across the world, and turning them into open, standardised data. Our primary goal is to make information on companies more usable and widely available for the public benefit, particularly to tackle the use of companies for criminal or anti-social purposes, for example corruption, money laundering and organised crime.
Access to open data about companies is essential infrastructure for everyone; from law enforcement countering fraud and money laundering, businesses researching suppliers and competitors, and journalists investigating the corporate world.
Despite the importance of this information, in many jurisdictions across the globe finding even basic records about a company can be surprisingly difficult. Accessing this information as open data is even harder.
OpenCorporates is creating a product that tracks the major events in the lifespan of a company, enabling clearer understanding of its day-to-day operations. Despite the importance of this data for all stakeholders of companies, surfacing this information is surprisingly difficult. In order to create this dataset, corporate events – for example incorporation, change of officers, mergers, acquisitions and winding up orders – are inferred from changes to official company registers, or extracted from government gazettes.
Knowing what happens in a company is not a luxury, it’s an essential requirement for healthy economies and societies.
The corporate events dataset will enable better understanding of how, when and why companies behave, drastically increasing visibility of the day to day running of a company.
Corporate events data underpin most business activity, comprising critical events in the lifecycle of a company. Yet, astonishingly, despite the importance and the fact that the key component data of this dataset are situated in public records and registers, there is no consolidated view of such events.
Within the work of the Corporate Events Data business case, the following critical, standardised corporate events will be made accessible for OpenCorporates users:
- Incorporation and dissolution of a company
- Changes in core attributes, such as name, registered address, company type, and industry codes
- Significant credit events
- Changes in leadership
- Changes in structure
- Changes in permissions, particularly change in licences
- Announcements and filings