An Identity Trust System

Companies House is the register of Companies in the UK. We incorporate and dissolve limited companies.

We register company information and make it available to the public. More then 4 million limited companies are registered in the UK, over 500,000 new companies are incorporated each year.

Our purpose is to drive confidence in the UK economy. We do this by primarily collecting and presenting data on UK companies that benefits the public good and the wider economy.

The information on the register is searched billions of times a year to support the making of millions of business decisions and is also used every day by the UK and overseas law enforcement, by civil society and by citizens. Companies House currently has no power to verify that individuals who appear on the Register of Companies are who they say they are.

Individuals are always considered attributes of a company, meaning that where somebody is, or has been involved in more than one company, we have multiple different copies of that person on our system. We perform some "matching and linking" of these duplicates but we are aware of deficiencies with this approach.

The net effect is that transparency of company ownership is compromised - the relationship between people and companies are not always clear. To assist with understanding the capabilities that exist in the market, Companies House is intending to hold an Early Market Engagement event which will assist with the decision on the possible procurement of an agile and fit for purpose solution.

At this stage Companies House has not identified a sourcing route for this procurement activity. The intention is to use the information gathered during the early market engagement to help shape the procurement process and specification for this project.

We would therefore like to offer suitably experienced and capable organisations the opportunity to attend this event and we are particularly keen to encourage attendance by SME suppliers Additional information: Companies House is developing an approach to how we trust, process, authenticate and administer identities and related transactions. This approach is based on a conceptual "Identity Trust System".

If taken forward, proposals contained in the Corporate Transparency and Register Reform Consultation would see Companies House given new powers to verify the identity of those individuals who set up , control and manage UK companies. We will require a solution to facilitate this requirement.

We will be holding an Early Market Engagement Webinar on the 11th December 2019 at 10am. Supplier face to face sessions will be available during January 2020, dates to be confirmed.