Covenance reads three company registers directly. For every other country, company data comes from a commercial provider and ownership evidence comes from documents. This page says what each of those means, and what to check before relying on a country.
A direct connection means Covenance calls the register's own service, under the terms the register set, and keeps the register's answer as the register gave it.
Four things follow from that, and all four are visible in a company file:
Three registers are connected directly today:
Companies House publishes the UK company register, including the register of people with significant control. Covenance reads it directly through the official API.
CVR is the Danish central business register. It publishes company data and legal owners, and holds beneficial owners under restricted access. Covenance reads it directly through the Danish Business Authority's system-to-system service.
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.
Company data for other countries comes from a commercial provider, and Covenance labels it as a provider rather than as a register, on the record and in the report.
A commercial provider aggregates company information from official and other sources and sells access to it. That is genuinely useful: it is how a company in a country with no machine-readable register, or no terms Covenance can accept, gets looked up at all. It is also a different kind of record, and the difference is kept rather than smoothed over.
What a provider route usually gives. Identity and profile data for the company, and in some countries headline figures from filed accounts.
What varies by country. Which fields come back, how current they are, and whether anything can be retrieved for a particular company at all. This is why a coverage question is answered per country rather than with a single number.
What a provider route does not give. The legal standing of a register's own answer. A provider record is a copy of, or a derivation from, register content, and Covenance never presents one as a register's answer. Where a provider offers a computed beneficial-owner list, every entry says on every surface that it was calculated by that provider and is not a declaration made to a register.
Outside the countries with a register connection, ownership evidence comes from documents the business supplies, and the file says so.
Covenance requests documents through an upload page carrying your brand, with no account for the customer to create: shareholder registers, articles of association, filings, declarations. Each claim read out of a document is recorded with the document it came from, so a reviewer can go back to the page it was on. Where a chain cannot be closed, the unresolved parts are shown as unresolved rather than left to look complete.
A chain built from documents is marked as built from documents. It is not presented as a register declaration, because it is not one, and the distinction is exactly what a reviewer needs when deciding how much weight a finding carries.
Five questions worth asking of any KYB provider, including this one. Coverage for a specific country has a specific answer, and it is one to get in writing rather than read off a map.
An official register, or a commercial provider. The answer changes what the record is, not only how complete it is.
A register declaration, a provider's own calculation, or documents the business supplies. All three can be useful. They are not the same evidence.
Identity and status are usually available. Officers, ownership, filings and accounts vary by country and by source.
Every value should carry the source it came from and the date it was read, and should say whether that source was a register, a provider or a document.
A licence or an access basis travels with the data. Some of it may be reused inside your file and reported on; some of it may only be read for the case it was pulled for.
Because register access is national, and it is still being built.
AMLD6 requires every Member State to keep a central register of beneficial owners and sets out who may read it, but those rules reach national law on a timetable: Articles 11, 12, 13 and 15, which are the access rules, were due by 10 July 2026, and the rest of the Directive by 10 July 2027 (Article 78(1) AMLD6). Until then, and in practice for a while after, each register is reached on its own terms.
Public access is no longer the default either. On 22 November 2022 the Court of Justice held, in Joined Cases C-37/20 and C-601/20, that the requirement to make beneficial ownership information accessible in all cases to any member of the general public was invalid. Several Member States closed public access to their registers in response. A register therefore has to be read on a specific basis, and holding that basis in a given country is work with a date on it rather than a switch.
That is why this site names three registers and describes a mechanism for the rest, instead of publishing a count. The guide explains the access tiers in full.
Read on 2026-10-25.