KYB and company-data glossary

Plain definitions of the 62 identifiers, registries, compliance terms and corporate events you meet when working with European company data — Spain, France, the UK, Ireland, Poland, Norway and Germany. One reference page rather than 62 thin ones.

Company identifiers

The numbers you actually key on. Getting these wrong is the most common cause of a failed match.

NIF (Spain): Número de Identificación Fiscal — the Spanish tax identifier. For companies it is the CIF format: a legal-form letter, seven digits and a control character. Carries a check digit, so typos are catchable offline.
CIF (Spain): The company form of the Spanish NIF. The leading letter encodes legal form: A for SA, B for SL, F for cooperative, G for association. An X, Y or Z prefix means it is a personal NIE, never a company.
NIE (Spain): Número de Identidad de Extranjero — the Spanish identifier for foreign individuals. Personal, not corporate; if a "company" identifier starts X, Y or Z, something is wrong upstream.
SIREN (France): The 9-digit identifier of a French legal unit, issued by INSEE. Luhn-checksummed. This is the key you store for a company.
SIRET (France): A SIREN plus a 5-digit NIC identifying one establishment. 14 digits, also Luhn-checked. A company has one SIREN and as many SIRETs as it has sites.
NIC (France): The 5-digit establishment suffix inside a SIRET.
Company number (United Kingdom): The Companies House identifier: 8 digits, or two letters and six digits (SC for Scotland, NI for Northern Ireland, OC for an LLP). Carries NO check digit, so it cannot be validated offline.
CRO number (Ireland): The Companies Registration Office identifier — a plain sequential integer, no check digit, no prefix. Only a lookup can confirm it.
KRS (Poland): The 10-digit Krajowy Rejestr Sądowy entry number. Only legal entities have one; sole traders are in CEIDG instead.
NIP (Poland): The 10-digit Polish tax number. Every business has one, including sole traders, and it becomes the EU VAT number when prefixed PL. Usually the most useful Polish key.
REGON (Poland): The statistical number issued by GUS — 9 digits for the entity, 14 for a local unit.
Organisasjonsnummer (Norway): Norway’s 9-digit organisation number, modulo-11 checksummed. Numbers in issue start around 810 000 000.
VAT number (EU): A country prefix plus a national number. Structure varies per member state; Greece uses EL, not GR, and Northern Ireland uses XI. Structure can be checked offline, but only VIES knows whether it is registered.
LEI (Global): Legal Entity Identifier — a 20-character global code with an ISO 7064 checksum, published by GLEIF as open data. Must be renewed annually; a lapsed LEI means the entity stopped re-validating.
EUID (EU): European Unique Identifier, assigned under the Business Registers Interconnection System (BRIS) to make cross-border company references unambiguous.

Registries and official sources

Where the data legally originates. If a provider will not name these, ask why.

BORME (Spain): Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil — the daily Spanish commercial-registry gazette. Incorporations, appointments, capital changes and dissolutions are published here.
BODACC (France): Bulletin Officiel des Annonces Civiles et Commerciales — the French official gazette carrying registrations, sales, and court judgments including insolvency.
Sirene (France): The INSEE register of French businesses and establishments — the source of SIREN and SIRET.
RNE (France): Registre National des Entreprises, run by INPI, which since 2023 consolidates French business registration.
Companies House (United Kingdom): The UK registrar. Publishes company data, officers, accounts and the PSC register as open data.
CRO (Ireland): Companies Registration Office — Ireland’s statutory registrar for companies and business names.
RBO (Ireland): Register of Beneficial Ownership — separate from the CRO. Public access was withdrawn after the 2022 CJEU ruling.
CEIDG (Poland): The central register of Polish sole traders. Distinct from the KRS, which covers legal entities only.
CRBR (Poland): Centralny Rejestr Beneficjentów Rzeczywistych — Poland’s beneficial-ownership register.
KRZ (Poland): Krajowy Rejestr Zadłużonych — the national register of debtors and insolvency proceedings.
Brønnøysundregistrene (Norway): The Norwegian register centre. Operates Enhetsregisteret, published as free open data.
Enhetsregisteret (Norway): Norway’s Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities — every registered organisation, with roles and status flags.
Handelsregister (Germany): The German commercial register, maintained by the local courts.
Transparenzregister (Germany): Germany’s beneficial-ownership register. Live access requires an account verified for legitimate interest under the Geldwäschegesetz.
Insolvenzbekanntmachungen (Germany): The official German insolvency announcements portal — the authoritative source for German insolvency proceedings.
The Gazette (United Kingdom): The UK official public record, carrying insolvency and corporate notices.
GLEIF (Global): Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation — publishes the LEI register, including Level-2 parent/child ownership relationships.
VIES (EU): VAT Information Exchange System — the European Commission service that confirms whether an EU VAT number is registered and active.

Compliance and screening

The vocabulary of the obligation that usually drives the purchase.

KYB: Know Your Business — verifying that a business counterparty exists, is who it claims to be, and is not sanctioned or otherwise prohibited. The corporate counterpart of KYC.
KYC: Know Your Customer — verifying the identity of an individual. Distinct from KYB, though a full onboarding usually needs both: KYB for the company, KYC for the people behind it.
AML: Anti-Money Laundering — the regulatory regime requiring firms to identify customers, screen them, and monitor for suspicious activity.
CDD: Customer Due Diligence — the baseline identification and verification obligation.
EDD: Enhanced Due Diligence — deeper checks triggered by higher risk, such as a PEP relationship or a high-risk jurisdiction.
UBO: Ultimate Beneficial Owner — the natural person who ultimately owns or controls an entity, commonly at a 25% threshold. EU public access to UBO registers was restricted by the November 2022 CJEU ruling.
PSC (United Kingdom): Person with Significant Control — the UK beneficial-ownership regime. Unusually, PSC data remains openly published, which makes UK ownership far more accessible than in most of the EU.
PEP: Politically Exposed Person — someone entrusted with a prominent public function, and by extension their relatives and close associates, who require enhanced scrutiny. RCA coverage is where most PEP datasets are weakest.
Adverse media: Negative news screening — searching media for indications of financial crime. Prone to false positives on common names.
Sanctions screening: Checking a name against government sanctions lists — EU, UN, OFAC, UK OFSI, French gels and others — plus export-control lists such as the BIS Entity List.
Export-control list: A restriction on what may be supplied to an entity, rather than a full asset freeze. The US Consolidated Screening List aggregates eleven such lists.
False positive: A screening match that is not the intended target. The dominant operational cost of screening, and why match scores and disambiguators matter more than raw list size.
Fuzzy matching: Approximate string matching that tolerates typos and transliteration — for example matching "Sberbnak" or "Kadirov" against an official spelling. Trigram similarity is a common implementation.
AMLR (EU): The EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation, part of the 2024 AML package, which harmonises requirements directly rather than through national transposition.
MiCA (EU): Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation — the EU authorisation regime for crypto-asset service providers, which brings CASPs into scope for KYB and AML obligations.
DAC7 (EU): The EU directive requiring digital platforms to collect and report identifying data about their business sellers.
Travel Rule: The requirement to transmit originator and beneficiary information alongside transfers, extended to crypto-asset transfers in the EU.

Corporate events and distress

What actually changes a credit or onboarding decision after the counterparty is already live.

Corporate event: A registry-published change in a company: appointment or removal of a director, capital change, address change, name change, merger or dissolution.
Insolvency: A formal proceeding arising from inability to pay debts. Published in official gazettes, and the single most decisive signal in counterparty monitoring.
Concurso de acreedores (Spain): The Spanish insolvency proceeding, published in BORME and the public insolvency register.
Procédure collective (France): The French umbrella term for insolvency proceedings — sauvegarde, redressement judiciaire and liquidation judiciaire — published in BODACC.
Liquidation: The winding-up of a company and distribution of its assets. May be compulsory (court-ordered) or voluntary.
Administration (United Kingdom): A UK procedure placing a company under an administrator, usually to attempt rescue, with a moratorium on creditor action.
Winding-up petition (United Kingdom): A creditor application to the court to liquidate a company. Often the earliest public distress signal.
Strike-off (United Kingdom): Removal of a company from the register, often for failure to file. Distinct from insolvency: it usually indicates dormancy rather than debt.
Dissolution: The end of a company’s legal existence. A dissolved counterparty cannot contract.
Phoenix company: A new company formed to continue the business of one that failed, typically with the same directors and a similar name. Detectable through director networks rather than any single record.
Shell company: An entity with no meaningful operations. Not unlawful in itself, but a recurring feature of fraud and layering.
Nominee director: Someone appointed to a board to obscure the real controller. A director appearing on an implausible number of companies is a common indicator.

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