Know-Your-Business (KYB) Datasets

This collection contains various large reference datasets, including company registries, beneficial ownership databases, and industry or domain specific databases. These data sources are used as a basis for data enrichment, a process designed to pick out risk-linked entities and their adjacent network from reference data sources to bring more detail to the main database.

The data exports listed here contain the complete datasets, but only a small fraction of each data source (the part that is identifiably linked to a sanctioned or otherwise notable entity) is eventually included in the main OpenSanctions product.

Some of the included data categories are:

• Company registries from various jurisdictions.
• Beneficial ownership databases for a small set of countries where those are open data.
• Reference data on LEIs (Legal Entity Identifiers), research organisations.
• Port state control data from various international reporting mechanisms.
• Banking reference data from the IRS, FinCEN and ISO 9362 (BIC).
• ICIJ's Offshore Leaks databases.

While the use of these data sources is covered by the data license, the degree of manual data cleaning performed on reference datasets is not as exhaustive as on the main dataset. The datasets are not deduplicated. This means that if a source registry publishes multiple records that describe a single person or company, they will be reproduced in this data as-is.

Most reference datasets are updated once a week. This doesn't apply to data sources which - by their nature - do not change on a regular basis (e.g. the ICIJ OffshoreLeaks database).

This collection is also the basis for OpenScreening, a proof of concept graph service released by Linkurious, Open Ownership and OpenSanctions in 2022.