On 22 November 2022, the EU’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union issued a judgment on the EU’s 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive, which invalidates the provision that information in the registers of beneficial owners must be accessible to the general public.

Following the judgment, some EU Member States have immediately suspended public access to their national registers of beneficial owners.

This has affected our ability to provide access to the beneficial owners data set in Luxembourg and to the beneficial owners document from the Transparency Register in Germany (ADDTRTRDE). Therefore, these have been disabled in KYC API and KYC Workspace, respectively.

Our connections to the beneficial owners registers in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Poland and Czech Republic remain live for the time being. Our KYB data expert team is continuing to closely monitor the developments around the registers’ response to the ruling, and further impact is expected.

For obliged entities as defined by the applicable anti-money laundering legislation, credentialed access rights to the registers of beneficial owners have been generally unaffected with this ruling. We can work with obliged entities to make available a solution that automates the data retrieval from the registers of beneficial owners, feeding it directly into their existing KYC platforms. If you are an AML-obliged entity, please reach out to your relationship manager to facilitate the next steps.