Most "global KYB" coverage matrices describe a green-checkmarked grid of two dozen jurisdictions and a single price next to the words "complete coverage". The grid is technically true. The price is misleading, because "coverage" almost always means a company name and a registered address. "Italy is supported" and "Italian shareholders are available" are not the same statement.
This ranking measures, for thirty national company registries, the five fields that matter for due diligence, compliance, and investigative research: company profile, officers, shareholders, financials, and filing documents. Every score reflects what the official government registry returns directly — not what an aggregator resells, and not what a vendor's marketing claims.
Methodology
- Profile — name search, and a structured record back (legal form, status, registered address, incorporation date).
- Officers — current directors and other registered officers, as a list, with appointment and termination dates.
- Shareholders — the share register, or where the share register is not public, the persons-with-significant-control register.
- Financials — annual accounts as structured line items, typically XBRL or iXBRL.
- Documents — the underlying filings (confirmation statements, articles of association, capital changes, mergers, charges) as retrievable files.
Each field is scored 0 to 3. 3 means a clean structured response. 2 means structured but limited (subset of fields, paywalled past a basic record, or AML-gated). 1 means available only by parsing a filing document. 0 means not exposed. Total is out of 15. Letter grades are attached purely for ranking order at a glance.
The ranking
| # | Country (registry) | Pr | Off | Sh | Fin | Doc | Total | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United Kingdom (GB) | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 15/15 | A+ |
| 2 | Finland (FI) | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 13/15 | A |
| 3 | Iceland (IS) | 3 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 12/15 | A |
| 4 | Australia (AU) | 3 | 3 | 3 | — | 3 | 12/15 | A |
| 5 | New Zealand (NZ) | 3 | 3 | 2 | — | 3 | 11/15 | B+ |
| 6 | South Korea (KR) | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 11/15 | B+ |
| 7 | Hong Kong (HK) | 2 | 3 | 3 | — | 3 | 11/15 | B+ |
| 8 | Poland (PL) | 3 | 2 | 2 | — | 3 | 10/15 | B+ |
| 9 | Monaco (MC) | 3 | 2 | 2 | — | 3 | 10/15 | B+ |
| 10 | Taiwan (TW) | 3 | 3 | 2 | — | — | 8/15 | B |
| 11 | Canada (CA) | 3 | 2 | 2 | — | 1 | 8/15 | B |
| 12 | Spain (ES) | 2 | 1 | 2 | — | 3 | 8/15 | B |
| 13 | Russia (RU) | 2 | 1 | 2 | — | 3 | 8/15 | B |
| 14 | Norway (NO) | 3 | 2 | 2 | — | — | 7/15 | C+ |
| 15 | Czechia (CZ) | 3 | 2 | 2 | — | — | 7/15 | C+ |
| 16 | Switzerland (CH) | 3 | 2 | 2 | — | — | 7/15 | C+ |
| 17 | Isle of Man (IM) | 3 | 1 | 1 | — | 1 | 6/15 | C+ |
| 18 | Mexico (MX) | 1 | 1 | 1 | — | 3 | 6/15 | C+ |
| 19 | Ireland (IE) | 2 | 1 | 1 | — | 1 | 5/15 | C |
| 20 | France (FR) | 3 | 2 | — | — | — | 5/15 | C |
| 21 | Belgium (BE) | 3 | 2 | — | — | — | 5/15 | C |
| 22 | Liechtenstein (LI) | 2 | 1 | 1 | — | 1 | 5/15 | C |
| 23 | Netherlands (NL) | — | — | 1 | 2 | 1 | 4/15 | C |
| 24 | Canada (CA-BC) | 3 | — | — | — | — | 3/15 | D |
| 25 | Cyprus (CY) | 3 | — | — | — | — | 3/15 | D |
| 26 | Italy (IT) | 2 | — | — | — | — | 2/15 | D |
| 27 | Malaysia (MY) | 2 | — | — | — | — | 2/15 | D |
| 28 | Cayman (KY) | 2 | — | — | — | — | 2/15 | D |
| 29 | Canada (CA-NT) | 1 | — | — | — | — | 1/15 | D |
Reading the table: bright green denotes a full structured endpoint; faded grey, a missing capability. A dash indicates the field is not exposed at all on the registry's public free surface.
United Kingdom: alone at the top
Companies House sits at 15/15. Profile, officers, persons with significant control, charges, and officer appointments are all available as structured fields, and annual accounts arrive as native iXBRL that parses cleanly into machine-readable line items. Shareholder data is the one field without its own structured endpoint, but the information is consistently published in confirmation-statement filings that can be retrieved and parsed.
Post-Brexit context explains most of the gap to the rest of Europe. Following the November 2022 CJEU ruling in Joined Cases C-37/20 and C-601/20, most EU member states restricted public access to beneficial-ownership registers; the UK retained full public PSC disclosure under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023.
The next tier: Nordic, Asia-Pacific, and a paid surface
Finland (13/15), Iceland (12/15), Australia (12/15), New Zealand (11/15), South Korea (11/15), and Hong Kong (11/15) all rank above every large continental-European jurisdiction.
Finland and Iceland operate textbook open registers: free public endpoints, structured shareholders, native XBRL financials. New Zealand publishes the share register, full officer history, and complete filing documents, though without XBRL line items. South Korea's OpenDART is distinctive for financials — every listed company files in a fixed XBRL taxonomy aligned with Korean Accounting Standards, which makes Korean balance sheets the cleanest machine-readable payload in the dataset.
Australia and Hong Kong sit slightly differently. Their statutory directors, members, and filings are exposed through paid official channels — ASIC's Connect / Online Services for Business in Australia, CR e-Search and the ICRIS extract service in Hong Kong. The registers themselves are not AML-gated; access is metered per query. Once paid, structured data is returned, which is why both score well above the free-profile-only jurisdictions.
Continental Europe after the CJEU ruling
France, Belgium, and the Netherlands rank notably below their governance reputations would suggest.
France's RNE exposes a clean public search and structured officer data following the 2023 Sirene + RNE canonicalisation, but beneficial-ownership data is no longer returned structurally. The Registre des bénéficiaires effectifs is access-controlled by Tracfin and requires a justified AML or legitimate-interest filing. Belgium's KBO follows the same pattern: structured officers and profile remain public, while UBO data sits behind the Financial Intelligence Processing Unit's gated portal.
The Netherlands is an outlier in a different direction. The public KVK Handelsregister open-data endpoint, implemented under the EU 2023/138 high-value-datasets regulation, legally strips company name, full address, officers, shareholders, and identifier fields from every response. What remains is the balance sheet — fully tagged iXBRL annual accounts. Financials score 2; everything else scores 0 or 1. The "Netherlands supported" claim made by aggregators rarely foreshadows this.
Italy is starker. The EU BRIS gateway is open but returns a profile only. Structured InfoCamere endpoints (Registro delle imprese visure) are paywalled per query and require a Telematico account. Italy scores 2/15.
Offshore jurisdictions
The common assumption that offshore registries are uniformly opaque is only partially borne out by the data.
Cayman scores 2/15. CIMA publishes the names of regulated financial entities and their licence type, which accounts for the score. The General Registry's Companies Online Search exposes the company name only; further fields are paid per item. The beneficial-ownership regime under the Beneficial Ownership Transparency Act 2023 is restricted to legitimate-interest applicants.
By contrast Cyprus's DRCOR is at 3/15. The eFiling Type-A endpoint returns a clean structured profile for free, but officers, shareholders, and filings all require a separate paid CY KO eFiling Type-B account. The Isle of Man sits at 6/15 — same model, but the DED makes officer and partial filing data free, then meters document downloads at a per-item charge.
Malaysia (2/15) presents a similar pattern at higher volume. The SSM e-Info portal publishes a structured profile for free and meters everything past it on a per-document basis.
Caveats on what the score does not capture
The score is structural — it measures whether each field is exposed, not the editorial quality of what comes back. Spain's BORME and Mexico's PSM both score on the document axis because they publish the filings, but the underlying documents are scanned PDFs of legal-gazette notices, not structured records. A document score of 3 from Companies House (iXBRL accounts, structured confirmation statements) carries materially more information than a 3 from BORME. The grade is a starting point; a working coverage assessment requires sample queries on the specific jurisdictions of interest.
Applying the ranking
For United Kingdom due diligence, no public registry approaches Companies House. The completeness, the absence of access gating, and the native iXBRL financials together exceed what any aggregator can offer on the same jurisdiction.
For cross-border KYB inside the European Union, the post-CJEU group (France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain in part) should be treated as profile-and-officers-only on the public surface. Shareholder and UBO data exist behind AML / legitimate-interest gates. Where due-diligence mandates qualify for such access, applications should be filed in advance. Where they do not, structured shareholder data must be extracted from confirmation filings.
For structured financials specifically — analyst comparables, portfolio screening, ratio analysis — the strongest sources are the United Kingdom (iXBRL), Finland (XBRL), South Korea (OpenDART), and the Netherlands (XBRL with personal data stripped under HVDS).
For ownership-chain investigations across multiple jurisdictions, the chain inherits the weakest link's accessibility. A chain from Cayman to Cyprus to Poland is bounded by Cayman's restrictions; a chain from the United Kingdom to Germany to Poland is fully walkable on public data.
Sources and revision
Scores reflect the registries as they currently respond. The ranking is revised when registry access policies change. Public-registry policy has been particularly active across the European Union following the 2022 CJEU ruling and the AML Authority Regulation (EU) 2024/1620, which is expected to drive harmonisation of UBO disclosure across member states.
Each score is reproducible against the relevant government registry's public endpoint, with per-jurisdiction technical notes available on the jurisdiction reference pages.