Understanding business ownership query results
Learn what each field within the business ownership query response means.
Australian Businesses Only
These results are applicable only to Australian Businesses queried using the Business Ownership Query.
Summary Information
The results of a full Business Ownership Query can be difficult to interpret correctly, as it mostly contains raw data.
But in order to make sense of the response, we include a summary section that provides an already processed version of the results that allows you to determine:
- High-level company details.
- Office bearers and their contact details.
- Listing details for publicly traded companies.
- KYC/AML summaries.
- Shareholdings and (ultimate) beneficial owners.
- Any issues that may have occurred throughout the check process
The summary is found in the uboResponse
field of the response object retrieved from the /retrieve
API call. See KYB Functional Call Flow for more.
Let’s break down each part of the uboResponse
in order to gain more perspective of what’s being returned:
If there’s a wish to drill into the details of any of these checks, or the overall ownership structure, it’s recommended you download the PDF report.
To obtain that data from the API response, please contact FrankieOne dev support for more information.
Understanding the full ownership tree
Understanding of the investigation of ownership is returned as part of the ownershipQueryResult
structure. ownershipQueryResult.ownershipDetails
is a map of entityIds to an object listing out officeholders, shareholders, shareCapital, as well as organisational information and any statically associated entities, and is read in a recursive manner.
Of interest are blockingEntityIds, which lists entities that couldn’t be investigated further, requiring manual intervention. eg: foreign companies or trusts.
To understand beneficial ownership, you can recursively look through the ownershipDetails of the root investigated organisation, and understand the shareholdings list of objects.
shareholdings
will reference members by entityId, the details of which you can look up under the associatedEntities map. However, where this entity is also an organisation with shares above the investigation threshold, you can see their shareholding details under a separate entry under the ownershipDetails map.
In this way, you can follow the trail of shareholding from the root entity under investigation to the individuals involved.
Consider an example of companyA owned wholly by companyB owned wholly by a single individual. The ownershipQueryResult structure may look something like the following.