Beauhurst launches True Companies
Beauhurst, the UK’s leading platform for private company intelligence, has launched True Companies, which enables firms, investors and public bodies to easily see the complete view of businesses as they actually operate, regardless of how many individual legal entities sit behind them.
Analysis by Beauhurst has revealed the complex structures behind the UK’s largest businesses, with some having more than 3,800 different entities registered with Companies House, highlighting the challenge of understanding businesses through corporate registries alone.
True Companies connects fragmented information held across corporate registries, patents, grants, funding records, acquisitions, news and company websites to create a unified view of an organisation. For the first time, users can understand the full scale, activity and trajectory of a business in a single, unified view, without manually piecing together information spread across multiple entities and data sources.
By creating a complete picture of how businesses are structured and operate, True Companies enables organisations to answer questions that were previously difficult or impossible to address accurately. Local and national government can identify economic strengths and weaknesses within regions, track major employers, understand innovation clusters, and target support more effectively. Investors and advisers can identify emerging growth opportunities earlier, assess risk more accurately, and understand the full extent of a business’s activities, investments and intellectual property.
It also enables firms to evaluate risk, identify businesses that are on a growth trajectory, and understand all aspects of an organisation so they can provide more timely and relevant guidance.
Toby Austin, founder and CEO of Beauhurst, said: “For decades, company intelligence has been constrained by legal entities. That’s useful for registration and compliance, but it’s not how people think about businesses and it’s not how economies work.
“A business’s employees, intellectual property, funding, acquisitions, financial performance and innovation activity are often spread across multiple entities. As a result, some of the most important signals about a business are hidden in plain sight.
“True Companies changes that. By connecting these entities and bringing together information from across multiple sources, we’re creating a complete picture of a business for the first time.
“That opens up entirely new possibilities. Governments can gain a more accurate understanding of their economies. Investors can identify opportunities sooner, advisers can provide better guidance, and organisations can finally understand businesses as they actually exist, rather than as they appear on a registry.”
The research by Beauhurst also found that only 29 of the UK’s largest 100 businesses hold patents on their primary legal entities, but more than 50 own patents elsewhere within their wider corporate structure. As a result, the patent activity of half of the UK’s largest businesses would be missed if only the parent company was viewed.
Additionally, nearly 90,000 UK businesses file their most meaningful financial data through subsidiary entities rather than their main registered company.
Through the unified business profiles that are enabled by True Companies, users can easily identify the complete financial information, key people, funding history, acquisitions, news, and patents across all of a business’s legal entities. Users are able to access granular data at entity level where required, and spot growth trends, innovation signals and expansion activity across the whole company that would otherwise be hidden across disconnected entities.