BIGregister

BIGregister is a centralized, open-access registry designed to catalog information about registered entities worldwide, including corporations, nonprofit organizations, and government bodies. It assigns a unique, persistent identifier to each entity and links to related records in national and international registries, enabling interoperability across administrative and research systems.

The registry collects metadata such as legal name, jurisdiction, registration number, status, date of incorporation or establishment, official address, and a standardized set of classifications (industry codes, entity type). It also stores cross-references to national registries, VAT numbers where permissible, and external identifiers such as LEI and other identifiers.

Data sources include national business registries, sectoral registries, and supranational bodies. Data are harmonized through a common schema, with deduplication, quality checks, and periodic reconciliation. Access to sensitive data is restricted or redacted in accordance with applicable privacy and data-protection laws.

Access is provided through a RESTful API, a search portal, and bulk export options. Developers and organizations use BIGregister to support due diligence, supply-chain risk management, regulatory reporting, and academic research. Data are typically offered under an open-data license with attribution or under paid licenses for enhanced datasets.

BIGregister was proposed by an international consortium of government agencies, standard-setting bodies, and non-profit organizations in 2015. A pilot phase ran from 2017 to 2018, with a public launch in 2019 and ongoing expansion to more jurisdictions and data sources. As of 2024, it covered dozens of jurisdictions and millions of entity records.

Reception has been mixed. It is widely used by corporate compliance teams and researchers for transparency and interoperability, but critics note potential update lags, uneven data quality across sources, and concerns about centralized governance and data governance.