ECCMA’s Hayley Thompson attended the annual meeting of the Corporate Registers Forum where she presented an overview of ISO standards and business registries.
Hayley shared how all businesses inside a corporate register have a universally unique identifier (see ISO 8000-116: Exchange of quality identifiers: Application of ISO 8000-115 to authoritative legal entity identifiers) that costs nothing to use. It is composed of the authoritative legal entity identifier that is issued to the company by the business register at the time of company formation preceded by a prefix that indicates the jurisdiction and the register where it is found. For instance, ECCMA is registered under the name of Code Management Association (ECCMA is our trade name) in the jurisdiction of the US state of Delaware in the business entity register under the identifier 3031657; thus, the universally unique identifier for ECCMA is US-DE.BER:3031657.
The use of the business register identifier, formatted in accordance with ISO 8000-116, gives a universally unique identifier that makes clear to anyone in which jurisdiction and in which register to look to verify that a company is actually a real business with the active status it needs to do business; using it helps enable the verification of potential trading partners with the relevant government agency decreasing corporate fraud risks and increasing trust before doing business. Additionally, before examining whether a company is in support of or working to the detriment of social and sustainable development goals, verifying it in the appropriate government business register positively identifies the company that needs to be examined.
She also presented on a new supply chain interoperability and integration standard under development (ISO 18008-110) for the request for and exchange of registry data. This standard will enable free, easy exchange of data between registers as well as a free tool for registers, should they choose to use it, to allow greater ease of access for all to their publicly available data. The registers were encouraged to participate in the development of this standard that will be for their use.
Finally, she introduced work on localization and how business registers can play a key role in improving the visibility of what products and services the businesses in their jurisdiction offer as a means to promote local businesses and improve the economy in their jurisdiction.
Learn more:
Are you a business register or other government register and wish to learn how you can implement the ISO format for the identifiers you issue?
Would your business register like to verify that the companies to which you grant foreign registration are found in and have active status in the register in which they claim to have domestic registration?
Are you interested in supporting local businesses?
Do you provide services to registers that may be interested in implementing these ISO standards?
Are you a buyer or supplier and not sure how to find or verify your identifier or that of your trading partners?
Contact Hayley Thompson (hayley.thompson@eccma.org) at ECCMA to start a conversation on these topics.