Why European Business Registry Data Is Still Stuck in 2005

In 2005, the European Commission co-funded a project called BRITE - Business Register Interoperability Throughout Europe. The goal was straightforward: connect the business registries of EU member states through a common API layer so that a developer in Amsterdam could query a company in Warsaw the same way they queried one in Rotterdam. Seventeen countries participated. Prototypes were built. Working groups convened. Conference papers were published.

By 2010, BRITE was quietly shelved. The web front-ends of most participating registries got a visual refresh. The APIs were never built.

That sequence - better UI, no API - is the defining pattern of European registry modernization for the past twenty years. And understanding why it keeps happening explains why anyone building compliance, credit, or due diligence tools in Europe still has to fight the same battles that developers were fighting when Internet Explorer 6 was the dominant browser.

The Policy Gap Nobody Talks About

EU law requires public disclosure of company registration data. The transparency directives are real, and member states comply with them. But "public disclosure" in legal terms means putting the information somewhere a human can see it. It does not require a machine-readable API. It does not require bulk download access. It does not require consistent formatting.

This distinction is not an oversight. It is load-bearing.

National registry operators have long-standing commercial relationships with incumbent data vendors - companies like Creditreform, KSV1870, Bureau van Dijk, and their local equivalents in each market. These vendors have data-sharing agreements that give them structured access to registry data, often at favorable rates, often with a multi-year head start. Every developer who can access registry data directly via a free API is one fewer potential customer for these vendors. Every country that publishes a real API is one less country where the incumbent's moat holds.

Registries are often semi-commercial entities with revenue targets. Data licensing is a meaningful revenue line. Building a free public API that replaces that revenue is not, from their perspective, a rational choice. So they comply with the letter of transparency law - the data is on the web - while making structured access expensive, inconvenient, or simply unavailable.

A Country-by-Country Illustration of the Problem

The pattern is consistent enough that it can be mapped:

The Poland case is particularly instructive because it shows the mechanism clearly. The KRS REST API is documented, maintained, and free. But if you query it for a company's board members, the names are returned as empty strings. Query the same company on the web portal at krs.ms.gov.pl, and the names are right there on screen. The official explanation is GDPR - personal data protection. But GDPR applies equally to the web portal, which returns exactly the same personal data without restriction. The difference is not legal. It is architectural. The API was built with the censorship as a feature, not a bug, because structured, queryable officer data is the core product of Polish commercial data providers like InfoVeriti and Bisnode Polska.

Spain: When a WAF Becomes Policy

Spain's BORME (Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil) published gazette entries as PDF files until 2013. Progress. But today, while structured data is technically available, there is no API - and attempts to download it systematically run into a WAF that blocks all datacenter IP ranges. You can visit the site from a home connection. You cannot access it from AWS, GCP, Azure, or any other cloud provider's address space.

Meanwhile, the Registro Mercantil Español sells official data packs. The pricing is non-trivial. The WAF policy and the commercial product are not coincidental.

France: The Fragmentation Trap

France took a different approach. Rather than a single gated registry, it built three. INSEE manages SIRENE (company identifiers and basic firmographics). INPI manages filings and financial statements. Local greffe portals handle the actual documents. Each has partial coverage. None of them cross-reference each other in a consistent way.

The INPI API, launched in 2022, is genuinely good - one of the better public-sector data APIs in Europe. It covers filings, beneficial ownership data, and financial statements for most French companies. But it does not return director cross-holdings (the network of who sits on which boards). That data lives in societe.com, a commercial service. So even France, which made a real effort, left a commercially valuable slice of the data in private hands.

The BRIS System: Progress, Framed Honestly

The EU's current cross-border effort is BRIS - the Business Registers Interconnection System. It launched in 2021 and genuinely works. A developer can query it across member states and get a consistent response.

What that response contains: company name, registration number, legal form, status.

What it does not contain: officers, shareholders, beneficial owners, financial data, insolvency proceedings, or any of the structured information that matters for compliance and due diligence.

BRIS is real progress. It is also a clear illustration of how low the ambition is. Twenty years after BRITE, the EU's connected registry infrastructure returns roughly the same data that a phone book would.

What This Means for Builders

If you are building a compliance tool, a credit risk platform, a KYC workflow, or an ESG supply-chain system that touches European companies, there is a practical conclusion here: you cannot design your architecture around official APIs. They either do not exist, return incomplete data, or will not scale to the volume you need.

This is not a temporary situation. Registry modernization is politically low-priority. The incumbent data vendors are well-organized and present in the conversations that shape policy. The EU's stated ambitions (the European Data Space, the Data Governance Act) do not directly mandate free machine-readable registry APIs. Even optimistic timelines put meaningful change 5-10 years out, and that assumes political will that is not currently visible.

The practical path - not the elegant one, but the real one - is structured scraping combined with whatever official API coverage exists. Czech Republic and Netherlands have usable APIs. Use them. For Poland, France, Austria, Germany, and Spain, you need a different layer: a reliable extraction pipeline that handles anti-bot measures, session management, rate limiting, and format normalization across jurisdictions.

The Honest Conclusion

The situation is improving, and it would be wrong to ignore that. The INPI API is genuinely useful. BRIS exists. The Czech ARES system shows that a government can build a clean, free, well-documented registry API when it chooses to. These examples matter because they prove the technical problem is solved - this is not hard engineering. It is a policy and incentive problem.

But for anything beyond basic company lookup - officers, shareholders, insolvency history, cross-border structures, financial filings - Europe's registries are still operating on a 2005-era model where "public" means "visible to humans on a website" and structured access is a product someone sells you. The BRITE initiative figured out exactly what needed to be built. Then the people who profit from not building it made sure it wasn't.

Until that changes, the only practical answer is a data layer that abstracts the fragmentation. If you are working on compliance, credit risk, or due diligence in Europe, that is what you need.

RegData provides structured access to European business registry data - company status, officers, insolvency records, and more - across 15+ jurisdictions. No per-country engineering required.

Explore RegData on Apify: https://apify.com/regdata