The Business Ownership Query will take an ACN or ABN, and then proceed to query government databases to ascertain:

• Name and corporate details of the company.
• Office-bearers, shareholders, and ultimate beneficial owners (where possible).
• Corporate structure.
• It can also optionally perform KYC and AML checks on any/all of the above.

An entity with just an ACN or ABN can be used to run this query, or alternatively provide both, and an optional company type (as per the ABR list of entity types) and company name. The query will also validate those supplied details to see if they match what is already on record. The service will stop should any material difference be found.

Receiving the response

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Background Processing

The Business Ownership Query endpoint always completes asynchronously, regardless of whether the X-Frankie-Background header is included in the request.

Business ownership queries are performed in the background and the result will be returned asynchronously. How long this takes depends on a number of factors:

• How complex a corporate structure do we need to traverse to obtain the ultimate beneficial owners.
• How many of the names and companies KYC/AML checks would be performed on.
• How complex a set of rules will apply to those KYC/AML checks.

A simple check on a company with one or two shareholders/owners can take around 20-30 seconds.

A more complex, multi-layered corporate structure with many shareholders and directors requiring checks can take upwards of 5 minutes.

See Asynchronous Calls (Backgrounding Processes) for more details.

ASIC Extract Only

This query can also be used to just pull back the ABR and ASIC data with no further checks or corporate structure traversals if all that is wanted is just the details of the company in question.

This can be done by setting the onlyProfile flag to true in the request.

HTTP POST /business/ownership/query?onlyProfile=true

See Defining an ORGANISATION entity object on how to create a simple organisation entity for querying.

Supported company/organisation types

At the time of writing (2021-09-12) the following company type codes can be supplied in the Business Ownership Query:

• PRV Australian Private Company
• PUB Australian Public Company
• IND Individual / Sole Trader
• Partnership (Limited and Family)
• Other Unincorporated Entities

These codes come from the ABR Entity Type list