UK PSC Tracker — Beneficial Ownership & Control

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Pull the UK Companies House Persons with Significant Control (PSC) register for any UK company, LLP, or Scottish Limited Partnership. Returns the beneficial owners and controllers — natural-person individuals, corporate-entity parents, legal persons, and super-secure (redacted) entries — along with the statutory nature-of-control codes that explain why each PSC is on the register (ownership of shares, voting rights, board-appointment rights, significant influence or control, control over a trust or firm). Per-PSC output includes name, kind, nationality, country of residence, partial date of birth (month + year), address country, the ownership percentage tier (25–50% / 50–75% / 75–100%), the full nature_of_control array, appointment date, and cessation date for historical PSCs.

The UK runs the most open, machine-readable beneficial-ownership register in the G7. Since 6 April 2016, under the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 (Part 21A of the Companies Act 2006), every UK limited company, LLP, and Scottish Limited Partnership has been statutorily required to maintain a PSC register, file PSC changes with Companies House within 14 days of becoming aware, and publish that register — name, partial DOB, nationality, country of residence, nature of control, and ownership tier — on the free public CH REST API at api.company-information.service.gov.uk. There is no enterprise contract, no per-record fee, no NDA, no rate-card. That openness is why the UK PSC register is the foundational input for KYC / KYB / AML / EDD / sanctions-screening pipelines at every UK challenger bank, every UK-licensed money-service business, every FCA Senior Manager Regime firm, every UK money-laundering reporting officer (MLRO), and every Big Four / mid-tier auditor running EDD on UK counterparties. It is also the canonical input for cross-border investigative journalism — the OCCRP, the ICIJ Pandora / Panama / Paradise Papers consortium, Bellingcat, Private Eye, openDemocracy, Transparency International UK, and Global Witness all build on top of this register.

This Actor wraps the official Companies House PSC endpoint (/company/{number}/persons-with-significant-control) with rate-limit-aware retry logic (CH enforces 600 requests every 5 minutes per key — this Actor handles HTTP 429 with exponential backoff so your overnight UBO sweep does not blow up at 03:00 GMT), exposes include_ceased as a top-level toggle so you can pull current-only or full-history PSCs in one run, and pushes every PSC as a single dataset row ready for downstream Snowflake / BigQuery / Postgres ingestion, n8n / Make / Zapier workflow ingestion, or Claude / OpenAI / Cursor agent ingestion via Apify's MCP server.

What is a PSC, exactly?

A Person with Significant Control is anyone — natural person, corporate entity, or legal person — who meets one or more of the five statutory conditions set out in Schedule 1A of the Companies Act 2006:

1. Direct or indirect ownership of more than 25% of shares — the classic majority-shareholder / minority-blocker test. A US private-equity holdco that owns 60% of a UK Topco's shares is a PSC under this condition.
2. Direct or indirect control of more than 25% of voting rights — captures voting-agreement structures, dual-class share schemes, and shareholder pools where economic ownership and voting power diverge.
3. Right to appoint or remove a majority of the board of directors — captures investor protection rights in venture-capital and private-equity term sheets, where the lead investor often retains board-appointment rights disproportionate to its equity stake.
4. Right to exercise, or actually exercising, significant influence or control over the company — the catch-all. Captures founders who have stepped down formally but still influence the company, non-executive chairmen with absolute veto rights, and shadow directors operating behind a nominee structure. UK guidance (BEIS / DBT statutory guidance under section 790E) gives ~15 worked examples of what counts as "significant influence or control."
5. Right to exercise, or actually exercising, significant influence or control over a trust or firm which itself meets conditions (1)–(4) — captures discretionary trusts, family offices, settlor / trustee / protector arrangements, and Channel Islands / IoM / BVI / Liechtenstein / Caymans structures used to layer beneficial ownership behind a trust wrapper.

The five conditions are deliberately overlapping — a PSC can hit one, several, or all five at once. The nature_of_control field on the output is a list of statutory codes, not a single value, so a 60% shareholder with board-appointment rights returns ["ownership-of-shares-50-to-75-percent", "voting-rights-50-to-75-percent", "right-to-appoint-and-remove-directors"] — three codes, one PSC row.

Significant influence vs control — and why this distinction matters

Conditions (4) and (5) — significant influence or significant control — are the AML / sanctions / UBO leg of the test where most of the shell-company misuse and sanctions-evasion structuring lives. Control in the CH guidance means "the power to direct" — the PSC can dictate decisions. Influence means the PSC has the power to ensure the company adopts activities the PSC desires, even if no formal control right exists. Both bring you onto the PSC register. Both are reportable. Both are screenable against OFSI / OFAC / EU / UN sanctions lists, against the UK Insolvency Service's Register of Disqualified Directors, and against PEP (Politically Exposed Person) lists.

The classic AML structures that conditions (4) and (5) catch:

• Nominee director + founder-influencer — the company has a £500-a-year nominee director on paper but the beneficial owner still calls every shot. Condition (4) brings the founder onto the PSC register even though they hold no shares and no voting rights.
• Family trust over offshore holdco over UK opco — the UK opco's PSC is the offshore holdco; the offshore holdco's PSC under its own register (if it has one) is the trust; the trust's settlor / beneficiary is the natural person. Condition (5) walks the trust leg, dragging the settlor / beneficiary onto the UK PSC register if they exercise significant influence over the trust.
• Shareholder agreement with veto rights — economic ownership sits at 10% but the shareholder has a contractual right to veto any sale, IPO, share issuance, or change of strategy. Condition (4) catches the veto-holder.

The super-secure-person-with-significant-control entry is the legitimate use case for redaction: section 790ZF Companies Act 2006 lets a PSC apply to suppress their name from the public register where they have shown a serious risk of violence or intimidation — domestic-abuse survivors, witness-protection cases, judges, MPs at risk of harassment. The Actor surfaces these as kind="super-secure-person-with-significant-control" (or the corresponding -beneficial-owner variant) with name=null. Do not treat super-secure as a red flag in itself — it is a statutory protection, not a concealment mechanism.

What you get per PSC row

Each dataset row is a single Companies House PSC record:

• name — the PSC's name as registered with Companies House, in CH's canonical SURNAME, Forename(s) casing for individuals or the legal name for corporate / legal-person PSCs. null for super-secure PSCs (statutorily redacted under section 790ZF Companies Act 2006).
• kind — one of the eight statutory CH kind codes: individual-person-with-significant-control, corporate-entity-person-with-significant-control, legal-person-person-with-significant-control, super-secure-person-with-significant-control, plus the four corresponding -beneficial-owner variants (used for non-UK registered entities that file a PSC equivalent under the Register of Overseas Entities regime).
• nationality — the PSC's stated nationality from their PSC01 filing (individuals only — corporate-entity and legal-person PSCs have no nationality).
• country_of_residence — the PSC's country of residence at country granularity only (NOT residential address — that is suppressed by CH on the public register).
• date_of_birth_year + date_of_birth_month — the partial DOB. Companies House has suppressed the day component on the public PSC register since 2018 under the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act, meaning every UK PSC's DOB on the public CH API is intentionally month + year only. This is the canonical KYC reality you need to design your fuzzy matching logic around — most KYC platforms (Onfido, Veriff, Sumsub, ComplyAdvantage, Trulioo) will collect full DOB from the gov-ID document and you match (year, month) against CH and accept the day as un-corroborated.
• address_country — the country component of the PSC's correspondence / service address as filed at CH (corporate / mail-handling, never residential).
• ownership_percentage_range — a human-readable summary of the highest ownership tier the PSC hits: 25-50%, 50-75%, or 75-100%. Synthesized from the nature_of_control codes. null when the PSC is on the register under conditions (3), (4), or (5) only (i.e. board-appointment rights, significant influence, or trust control with no direct ownership).
• nature_of_control — the full array of statutory CH codes that put the PSC on the register. Always populated. Typical values: ownership-of-shares-25-to-50-percent, ownership-of-shares-50-to-75-percent, ownership-of-shares-75-to-100-percent, voting-rights-25-to-50-percent, voting-rights-50-to-75-percent, voting-rights-75-to-100-percent, right-to-appoint-and-remove-directors, significant-influence-or-control, right-to-share-surplus-assets-25-to-50-percent, significant-influence-or-control-of-trust, significant-influence-or-control-of-firm.
• appointed_on — ISO YYYY-MM-DD date the PSC was notified to Companies House.
• ceased_on — ISO YYYY-MM-DD date the PSC ceased to be a PSC (null for current PSCs). Surfaces only when includeCeased=true.
• company_name + company_number — the company the PSC is registered against (CH 8-character canonical identifier — 8 digits for E&W, SC + 6 for Scotland, NI + 6 for Northern Ireland).
• data_source — Companies House REST API (api.company-information.service.gov.uk).

Use cases — AML, KYC, UBO, sanctions, journalism

1. AML EDD on UK shell-company structures. Sweep the PSC register across known shell-company clusters (Scottish Limited Partnerships, LLPs in nominee-director networks documented by the OCCRP / openDemocracy / Private Eye) with includeCeased=true, and the output gives you the full beneficial-ownership timeline of each cluster — every individual who has been a PSC, when they became one, when they ceased. Pair with UK Companies House Officers for the parallel director / secretary leg of the same KYB sweep.

2. OFSI / OFAC / EU sanctions screening on UK counterparties. Before any UK-jurisdiction trade, payment, or contract, FCA + OFSI guidance requires you to screen the beneficial owners — not just the legal entity, not just the directors — against the OFSI consolidated list, OFAC SDN list, EU consolidated list, and UN 1267 list. This Actor surfaces the PSC list cleanly so you can run name + partial-DOB fuzzy matching against your sanctions screening provider's API (ComplyAdvantage, Refinitiv World-Check, LexisNexis Bridger, Dow Jones Risk Center). Critical under the Russia / Belarus / Iran / DPRK sanctions regimes where 50%-or-more aggregate ownership by a sanctioned party brings the company into scope (the OFAC "50% rule" / OFSI equivalent — and the PSC ownership tier directly informs that calculation).

3. PEP (Politically Exposed Persons) screening on UK private companies. UK private companies — especially UK Plcs in regulated sectors (banking, defence, energy, telecoms, healthcare, gambling) — frequently have PSCs who are domestic or foreign PEPs, family members of PEPs, or close associates. Sweep the PSC list, layer in your PEP screening provider (Refinitiv, Dow Jones, ComplyAdvantage), and surface any PEP-linked beneficial owner for enhanced due diligence under regulation 35 of the Money Laundering Regulations 2017.

4. M&A diligence — full beneficial-ownership reveal before LOI. Before LOI on a UK target, pull the target's current PSCs plus historical (includeCeased=true) — the historical view often surfaces founders who exited at a prior funding round, family-trust structures wound up before sale, or PE / VC syndicate members who exited via secondary. Cross-reference the corporate-entity PSCs against France Pappers Companies (for French parent companies), Singapore ACRA Companies (for Singapore holdcos), India MCA Companies (for Indian parents), and Hong Kong Companies Registry (for Hong Kong holdcos).

5. Register of Overseas Entities cross-reference. Since 1 August 2022, non-UK entities owning UK real estate must register with Companies House under the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 and file their beneficial owners. Those filings appear under the *-beneficial-owner kind variants on the PSC endpoint. This Actor returns them in the same dataset row format as the domestic PSC entries — same schema, same field names, ready for unified UBO screening across UK Ltds + overseas-entity property owners.

6. Investigative journalism — cross-border layering and trust unwinding. The OCCRP, ICIJ, Bellingcat, openDemocracy, Private Eye, and Transparency International UK have all used CH PSC data as the primary discovery layer for UK-domiciled shell entities used in cross-border layering schemes. Set includeCeased=true, sweep across a cluster of UK Ltds tied to a target individual, build the time-series of PSC changes (appointed → ceased → appointed → ceased), and the output feeds directly into Linkurious / Neo4j / Maltego graph databases.

7. Audit firms — Big Four EDD pipeline for client onboarding. Big Four UK audit practices run mandatory EDD on every new audit client and every new advisory client under ISA (UK) 240 and the FRC's Ethical Standard. The PSC pull is one of the first canonical steps in the EDD workflow. This Actor is the direct, programmatic way to feed PSC data into that workflow at scale.

8. Tax-authority + HMRC UBO research. HMRC and the Joint Money Laundering Steering Group (JMLSG) reference the PSC register as the canonical UBO source for UK tax investigations, COP9 (Code of Practice 9) tax-fraud investigations, and Criminal Finance Act 2017 corporate-failure-to-prevent investigations. PSC data feeds directly into HMRC's risk-rating engine.

How this Actor compares vs. enterprise alternatives

Bottom line: Bureau van Dijk Orbis, Refinitiv World-Check One, Sayari Graph, and Moody's Maxsight are the right answer if you have a multi-jurisdiction enterprise compliance program with a six-figure annual budget, a vendor-management process, and a need for graph-walking across the global corporate-entity graph (where each PSC corporate parent is itself resolved to its own PSCs / UBOs, recursively). Going direct to Companies House is the right answer if you have the engineering capacity to handle the 600 req / 5-min rate limit yourself, manage the API-key rotation, build the retry / backoff layer, and own the Snowflake / BigQuery ingestion ETL. This Actor is the right answer when you want clean, structured UK PSC data, in a pay-as-you-go model, with rate-limit handling and Snowflake / BigQuery / MCP / n8n ingestion already done — at $0.10 per PSC record instead of $30k–$60k per Orbis / Refinitiv / Sayari / Moody's seat.

Input

• companyNumber — exact 8-char Companies House identifier (00445790, SC090312, NI012345). Preferred for deterministic lookups.
• companyName — partial-match company name (used only when companyNumber is blank). The actor calls /search/companies and pulls PSC data for the top match.
• includeCeased — boolean, default false. When true, returns PSCs whose control has ceased (founder exited at IPO, parent sold to a buyer, trust wound up) in addition to current PSCs.
• maxResults — hard cap on total PSC rows returned (1–200, prefill 25).
• companyHouseApiKey — REQUIRED. Free key from https://developer.company-information.service.gov.uk/. Without a key the actor exits gracefully with status="_blocked" and instructions — no per-record charge is billed.

Pricing — pay per PSC record

• apify-actor-start — minimal flat fee at run start (covers infrastructure & connection setup)
• apify-default-dataset-item — $0.10 per UK PSC record pushed to the dataset

A typical 5-PSC KYB sweep on one UK target company costs ~$0.50. A 50-PSC M&A diligence sweep across a 5-subsidiary group costs ~$5. A 1,000-PSC sector-wide UBO pull across a list of UK Ltds costs ~$100. For context: BvD Orbis / Refinitiv World-Check / Sayari / Moody's Maxsight UBO seats run $30k–$60k per analyst per year. This Actor sits ~2–3 orders of magnitude below the enterprise alternatives on a per-record basis.

Companies House rate limits — and how this Actor handles them

The official Companies House REST API enforces a 600 request / 5-minute rolling rate limit per API key. Every PSC lookup costs 2–3 requests (one optional /search/companies, one /company/{number} to resolve, one or more /company/{number}/persons-with-significant-control paginated). That buys you roughly 200–300 company PSC pulls every 5 minutes per key, or ~2,400–3,600 per hour. This Actor handles the rate limit gracefully:

1. HTTP 429 detection — every request inspects status. A 429 triggers exponential backoff (1.5s → 3s → 6s → 12s → 24s) honouring the Retry-After header when present.
2. 5xx detection — CH occasionally returns 502 / 503 under load. Same exponential-backoff retry loop, max 5 attempts.
3. Pagination — the Actor pages through /persons-with-significant-control 50 items at a time via start_index, honouring the maxResults ceiling.

If you are running a UBO sweep across >300 UK companies, rotate two or more API keys (each free, each independently rate-limited).

Related actors

• UK Companies House Officers — directors / secretaries / LLP members. The director leg of the same UK KYB workflow.
• France Pappers Companies — French commercial register (INPI / Pappers). Use for French parent-company UBO walks.
• India MCA Companies — India Ministry of Corporate Affairs register.
• Singapore ACRA Companies — Singapore Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority register.
• Hong Kong Companies Registry — HK Companies Registry / Cyber Search Centre.

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