INPI keeps the French Registre national des entreprises and the Registre des bénéficiaires effectifs. Covenance reads both directly, and the second under a granted access habilitation.
INPI, Registre national des entreprises, kept by INPI, the Institut national de la propriété industrielle.
Since 1 January 2023 the Registre national des entreprises, the RNE, has been the single French business register, bringing together the former national trade and companies register, the trades register and the agricultural assets register. INPI keeps it, and it is fed by the declarations businesses make through the guichet unique. Company data from the RNE is open register content, available through INPI's API and file service.
France is two registers in one response. The beneficial owners are the Registre des bénéficiaires effectifs, the RBE, and in law they are a separate register with their own access rules, even though they arrive inside the same company document. INPI states that since 31 July 2024, following the Court of Justice's judgment of 22 November 2022, access to beneficial-owner data is restricted to defined categories of requester.
Those categories are set by the Code monétaire et financier: the authorities named in art. L. 561-46, the persons subject to anti-money-laundering vigilance obligations under art. L. 561-2, and persons who can demonstrate a legitimate interest under art. L. 561-46-2. Covenance holds an access habilitation under art. L. 561-46-2, as an external provider to firms that are themselves subject to those vigilance obligations.
Taken from the register's own documentation and from the national rules it is kept under. The sources are listed at the foot of this page.
| Information | Access | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Company data | Public | Legal form, name, SIREN, share capital, activity codes, addresses and status, for companies, sole traders and agricultural holdings. |
| Officers and representatives | Public | The people with powers over the business, as declared in the register's own composition data. |
| Legal owners | Not published | France publishes no shareholder register. The RNE carries the officers and the RBE carries the beneficial owners, with no layer of registered shareholdings between them. |
| Beneficial owners | Restricted | Declared beneficial owners with the nature and extent of the interests held. A requester with a legitimate interest receives the name, usual name, pseudonym, first names, month and year of birth, country of residence and nationality, and the nature and extent of the interests. There is no full date of birth and no address. |
| Filings and documents | Public | The acts and annual accounts filed with the register, available as documents on request. |
| Annual accounts | Public | INPI's keyed-in accounts, as structured figures rather than scans, for financial years from 2016 filed from 2017. |
The list below is what the connector actually calls, not what the register could in principle provide. Every value Covenance stores carries its source and the date it was read.
Profile, address, activity codes and status, keyed on the SIREN.
Active officeholders from the register's composition data.
The RBE block, pulled for a named case under the habilitation, and stripped out of everything else before it is stored.
The register's list of acts and accounts, with documents fetched only when a reviewer asks for one.
The structured figures INPI keyed in, with the register's own reason where a filing was withheld.
A register answers the questions it holds answers to. These are the limits that change what an onboarding file can conclude, stated rather than left to be discovered.
A French ownership chain goes from the company to its declared beneficial owners. There is no register of shareholdings in between, so a chain that needs the intermediate holdings has to get them from documents.
The connector reads a company by its SIREN, the nine-digit legal unit identifier. A SIRET identifies an establishment and normalises to its SIREN; a French VAT number is never the key.
The habilitation grants access, not reuse. Covenance may pass French beneficial-owner data only to clients who are themselves subject to the vigilance obligations of art. L. 561-2, and the restriction is enforced where the data is read rather than left to a policy document.
The RBE supplies the month and year of birth and the country of residence, with no full date of birth and no address. Covenance keeps exactly that and never completes it from another source.
A micro-undertaking may declare that its annual accounts are not made public, and a small undertaking may ask that its income statement is not, under art. L. 232-25 of the Code de commerce. A withheld or unkeyed filing is reported with the register's own reason and never read as zero.
The register's composition data carries the people currently in post. A history of departures is not part of what it publishes.
A licence or an access basis is part of the record, not a footnote: it decides what may be done with a value after it is read.
RNE company data is read under INPI's register terms and carries the attribution “Données du Registre national des entreprises (RNE) fournies par l’INPI.”
RBE beneficial-owner data is read under INPI's terms of use for beneficial-ownership access and Covenance's habilitation, which grant access and no reuse rights.
Read on 2026-10-25. Where a fact about the register comes from a national instrument rather than from the register's own pages, the instrument is cited.