How Many Companies Actually Disclose Their Owners? A Beneficial Ownership Register Data Analysis

Ask a compliance team how many companies actually disclose their beneficial owners, and most will answer with a regulation, not a number. We ran the query instead. In a live sample of 320 companies queried directly against Zavia’s dataset on 2026-10-21, 38.4% return a populated shareholder list at all — and among the ones that do, who gets named depends almost entirely on which country they’re in.

That is the headline finding of a live-API analysis of beneficial ownership register data, run directly against Zavia’s dataset on 2026-10-21. Every figure in this article comes from a fresh request made at analysis time, not from a locally stored value read off a dashboard. We queried a stratified sample of 320 companies — 40 drawn from each of 8 countries (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Singapore, Spain) — twice each: once for a shareholder list, once for a group structure, for 640 live requests in total. A beneficial owner — a natural person who ultimately owns or controls a company, as distinct from the legal owner named on a share register — is only discoverable at all if a shareholder record exists in the first place, and only identifiable as a person if that record names one. This piece measures both gates.

Disclosure rate by country and the share naming an actual person — both from the live 2026-10-21 sample.

01The 38.4% number, and why it isn’t a data-quality problem

38.4% sounds low for a company data platform whose entire premise is ownership visibility. It isn’t a gap in Zavia’s coverage — it’s a direct readout of what registries themselves make public. Coverage and disclosure are two different measurements: a platform can have a live connection to a country’s company registry and still return no shareholder list, because the registry itself never publishes one. When a shareholder query returns no data, the record doesn’t come back empty; it comes back with an explanation. Querying live just now, a Dutch company without a public shareholder record returned: “Shareholder information for companies in the Netherlands is filed with the Chamber of Commerce (KVK) and the UBO Register. If no shareholders are displayed, the company may be newly incorporated, the first filing deadline may not yet have passed, filings may be overdue, or UBO access may be restricted.” The absence of data is itself a data point: a specific registry, with a specific access rule, returned live, right now.

This piece is built on a second distinction that turns out to matter more than the headline number suggests. Legal ownership — who is named on a share register — is frequently public. Beneficial ownership (UBO) — who actually controls the entity, once nominees, funds, and holding layers are unwound — is what this analysis is really after, and Section 09 shows that even when a shareholder list exists, it is often a fund’s name, not a person’s.

02How we measured it

We used Zavia’s own catalog of company records only to decide which real companies to query — not to source the statistic itself. For each of 8 countries (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Singapore, Spain) we drew 40 companies and, for every one of the 320, made two live requests at analysis time on 2026-10-21: GET /v2/kyb/{company_id}/shareholders and GET /v2/kyb/{company_id}/group-structures/full — 640 live calls in total. A response counted as disclosing only when the endpoint returned HTTP 200 with a populated array. An HTTP 404 counted as not disclosing. Across all 320 shareholder calls, every non-disclosing response came back as a clean HTTP 404 with a structured explanation — no ambiguous empty-200s, no timeouts, zero errors. Three of the 320 group-structure calls (one UK company, two French companies) hit a transient network error; rather than exclude them, we counted them conservatively as “no group structure found,” which slightly understates that figure if anything. No rate-limit response was hit at any point in this run.

03The global disclosure rate

Across the 320 companies sampled live, 123 returned a populated shareholder list. The remaining 197 — 61.6% of the sample — came back as a clean HTTP 404 with a named registry-access explanation. Group structure is a different, more generous signal: 233 of 320 companies (72.8%) resolved to a parent, subsidiary, or affiliate linkage, even where the shareholder list itself stayed closed.

04Disclosure by country, ranked

The 8 countries in this sample span the full range of outcomes, from 85% down to zero, with no obvious correlation to legal tradition alone — two civil-law jurisdictions in the sample (France and Italy) land on opposite ends of the table.

The United States returned real shareholder data for 34 of the 40 companies sampled live (85.0%) — the highest rate in this round. The United Kingdom and France tie at 65.0% (26 of 40 each), Germany follows at 55.0% (22 of 40). The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Singapore sit well below the mean, down to zero for Singapore. Section 09 below shows why a high rate for the US is not the same good news it looks like at first glance.

05Where disclosure was highest in this sample

Four of the 8 sampled countries cleared 50% live. The United States’ 85.0% is driven heavily by SEC-registered filers in the sample, whose institutional holders (index funds, custodians) are disclosed as a matter of securities law, not company law.

The UK’s Companies House People with Significant Control register is the reference case for registry-first design: a statutory, searchable, free public register with mandatory filing at incorporation, which is consistent with its 65.0% live-sample result. France’s identical 65.0% comes from a different mechanism entirely, discussed in Section 09: its Registre des Bénéficiaires Effectifs is built specifically to name a natural person, not a nominee.

06Where disclosure was lowest in this sample

At the other end, Singapore returned zero disclosing companies out of 40 sampled live. This is a fact about registry access, not about Singapore’s companies: the API’s own explanation, returned live for a sampled Singaporean company, reads: “Shareholder information for companies in Singapore is filed with ACRA (BizFile+) and includes the Register of Registrable Controllers. If no shareholders are displayed, the company may be newly incorporated, the first filing deadline may not yet have passed, filings may be overdue.”

Spain (5.0%, 2 of 40) and Italy (12.5%, 5 of 40) follow the same pattern as Singapore for different legal reasons, covered in Section 10: both route ownership data through a chamber-of-commerce or notarial system that files the information without making public bulk access the default. The Netherlands (20.0%, 8 of 40) has a functioning UBO register that nonetheless returns the lowest rate among the four largest-disclosure countries — also explained in Section 10.

07Best vs. worst, side by side

Table 1. Live sample queried directly against Zavia’s dataset, run 2026-10-21, 320 companies across 8 countries. United Kingdom and France tied for rank 2.

The spread is not incremental. It is the difference between a registry built to be queried and one built to be filed and forgotten — an 85-percentage-point gap between the top and bottom of the same table, on the same day, using the same query logic.

08Group structures: a second, separate ownership signal

Shareholder disclosure and group-structure disclosure are not the same measurement, and the gap between them (38.4% vs. 72.8% in this live sample) is informative on its own. Germany shows the clearest version of the pattern: just 55.0% of sampled German companies disclosed a shareholder list, but 97.5% resolved to a group structure — a 42.5-point gap, the widest of any country in this round. A company can sit inside a visible corporate family tree while its own shareholder register, the list of who holds the equity at that specific entity, stays closed.

Table 2. Live sample, 40 companies per country, run 2026-10-21.

09The real finding: when a shareholder is named, who is it?

A disclosure rate on its own conflates two very different outcomes. A shareholder list can name an institution — a fund, a custodian, a nominee — or it can name an actual person. Across the 123 companies in this sample that disclosed anything, only 48 (39.0%) named at least one natural person; the other 75 (61.0%) listed exclusively corporate or institutional holders. That split is not evenly distributed by country, and the pattern reverses the US’s apparent lead from Section 04.

France’s 65.0% headline rate from Section 04 understates how informative its disclosures are: 76.9% of the French companies that disclosed anything named an actual person, consistent with a Registre des Bénéficiaires Effectifs built specifically to name a natural person rather than a holding entity. The United States’ 85.0% headline rate overstates it in the opposite direction: only 14.7% of the US companies that disclosed anything named a person at all — the rest listed index funds, custodians, and nominee entities, the Vanguard-and-UBS-type institutional holders that SEC disclosure rules require regardless of who actually controls the company. A high US disclosure rate in this sample is mostly a readout of index-fund ownership of large companies, not a readout of beneficial-ownership transparency.

10Why beneficial ownership disclosure varies this much by jurisdiction

Registry design: statutory filing vs. securities-law disclosure

The UK’s People with Significant Control regime makes shareholder disclosure a condition of incorporation, filed to a central, searchable database — a company-law mechanism. The US’s relatively high rate in this sample runs on a different rail entirely: it is driven by securities law (13D/G-style institutional-holder disclosure for SEC-registered issuers), which explains why Section 09 finds so few named individuals behind it. Most private US companies, which form at the state level with no equivalent public shareholder-filing requirement, are not what is driving the 85.0% figure.

The 2022 CJEU ruling and public UBO access

The Netherlands built a functioning UBO Register, then had its public-access tier substantially narrowed following the Court of Justice of the EU’s November 2022 ruling that unrestricted public access to beneficial-ownership data breached fundamental privacy rights under EU law. Several EU member states tightened public UBO access in response. That is consistent with what this sample shows for the Netherlands: a 20.0% live disclosure rate despite a modern, functioning register — the register exists, the public query path to it largely does not.

Legal tradition and disclosure design, not just common-law vs. civil-law

The common-law/civil-law split does not fully explain this sample: France (civil law) ties the UK (common law) at 65.0% and names more individuals per disclosure than either. Italy’s Registro delle Imprese and Spain’s RCTIR both illustrate the lower end instead: the register exists, the data is filed with a chamber of commerce or notarial system, and public bulk access is the exception rather than the rule, which tracks with their 12.5% and 5.0% live rates here. Singapore’s ACRA BizFile+ and Register of Registrable Controllers follow a comparable filed-but-not-broadly-public model, consistent with the zero disclosures returned live in this sample.

11What “no shareholder data” actually means

In this live sample, all 197 non-disclosing shareholder calls (61.6% of the 320) came back as a clean HTTP 404 carrying a structured explanation naming the registry and the access rule — not a bare, unexplained null. Querying three of those explanations live for this article returned:

• Netherlands: “Shareholder information for companies in the Netherlands is filed with the Chamber of Commerce (KVK) and the UBO Register. If no shareholders are displayed, the company may be newly incorporated, the first filing deadline may not yet have passed, filings may be overdue, or UBO access may be restricted.”
• United States: “Shareholder information for companies in the United States is filed at state level (Delaware, California, etc.) with varying disclosure rules. Most private companies do not publicly disclose detailed shareholder lists. SEC-registered companies disclose shareholders publicly. If no shareholders are displayed, the company is likely a private entity exempt from public disclosure.”
• Singapore: “Shareholder information for companies in Singapore is filed with ACRA (BizFile+) and includes the Register of Registrable Controllers. If no shareholders are displayed, the company may be newly incorporated, the first filing deadline may not yet have passed, filings may be overdue.”

The absence of a shareholder list is, in other words, traceable to a specific, named legal cause in this sample — not to a broken pipeline.

12What this means for KYB and compliance teams

A 38.4% baseline disclosure rate has a direct operational consequence: any KYB (know-your-business) workflow built on the assumption that a shareholder list will simply be there is failing on roughly three out of every five companies before enhanced due diligence even starts. Section 09 adds a sharper warning: even when a list does appear, 61.0% of the time in this sample it names only institutions, not people — so “disclosure” and “beneficial-owner identification” cannot be treated as the same checkbox. The practical response is to build the escalation path into the workflow itself: when the registry-first shareholder pull comes back empty or institution-only, move to group-structure resolution (72.8% coverage in this sample), then to officer records, then to adverse-media and sanctions cross-checks, rather than treating a closed or fund-only register as a dead end.

This also reframes how a risk score should treat non-disclosure. A model that penalizes every company with an empty or institution-only shareholder field will systematically flag entire jurisdictions and entire ownership structures (index-fund-held public companies, for instance) rather than individual risk. The more useful signal is the combination: a company with no shareholder disclosure, no resolvable group structure, and no verifiable officer record is a materially different case than one with a closed register but a clean, traceable parent entity in a transparent jurisdiction.

13How this connects to the rest of Zavia’s data coverage

This analysis measures a rate; it doesn’t catalog what data exists where. For a country-by-country reference of what corporate ownership data is available and how to access it, see Zavia’s Global Ownership Data Index, which covers registry type, access model, and disclosure thresholds across 173+ countries. This piece is the empirical companion to that index: it measures what the registries described there actually return, in aggregate, right now. Independent context on national-level commitments comes from Open Ownership’s global register map, which tracks how many jurisdictions have planned, are implementing, or already operate a beneficial ownership register — a measure of legal commitment, distinct from the disclosure-in-practice rate measured here.

14Glossary

15Frequently asked questions

See the companion analysis, Legal Form and Ownership Transparency, for the same live-data methodology cut by entity type instead of country. For why matching the right entity record matters before any of these rates can be trusted, see Entity Resolution and Ownership Graphs.