The same company appears under a different number in every source: a CIK at the SEC, an LEI at GLEIF, a CRD on Form ADV, a UEI at USAspending, a company number at Companies House, a QID on Wikidata, a name on a patent assignment. The company graph joins them into one entity, and says how each join was made.
How entities are built
- Identifiers first. A source that states two identifiers belong to one entity makes the join: Form ADV Item 1.P (an adviser's LEI next to its CRD) and Item 1.D(3) (its CIK numbers), GLEIF's record of a UK entity's Companies House number, and Wikidata's CIK, LEI and Companies House properties.
- Names second. Names are compared after removing legal forms and punctuation, and each match gets a confidence score. The same name in the same U.S. state scores 0.92; a distinctive name that is unique across the graph scores 0.9; anything else scores lower. Only scores of 0.9 or more merge.
- Never two of one kind. An entity never holds two LEIs, CRDs, Wikidata items or Companies House numbers, or two CIKs unless an adviser lists them as its own. A match that would break this is refused.
- Evidence kept. Every identifier records the source, method, score and evidence of its match. Matches that were refused or scored too low are kept as candidates, so you can review them, but they are never merged.
Ownership trees
GLEIF Level 2 data records each entity's direct and ultimate accounting-consolidation parents, and fund manager, umbrella and master-fund links. An entity's page in the API climbs the parent chain to the ultimate parent and lists its children. Where GLEIF has no parent, it gives the reason (for example, owned by natural persons). GLEIF parents reflect accounting consolidation as reported to the LEI issuer, not ownership percentages.
UK companies
Palanor reads the monthly Companies House snapshot of every live body on the register and counts new companies and removals each month, by industry (the SIC 2007 section of the first SIC code) and by region (from the registered-office postcode). Companies House's own quarterly statistics are signals too, back to 2012. The share of new companies with a person of significant control resident or registered outside the UK is computed each month from the PSC snapshot, as aggregates only.
In the API and MCP
- /v1/entities and palanor_find_entities search by name or by any identifier (ticker:AAPL, lei:…, cik:…, crd:…, uei:…, qid:…, gb_ch:…). Pro and Enterprise keys.
- /v1/entities/{id} and palanor_get_entity return one entity with its identifiers and their evidence, unmerged candidates and its ownership tree. Pro and Enterprise keys.
Signals
gleif.new_leis counts new LEIs each month worldwide, in the U.S., in the UK, and for U.S. funds. uk.companies.incorporations_q and dissolutions_q are Companies House's quarterly statistics. uk.companies.new and uk.companies.removed are Palanor's monthly counts, in total, by sector and by region.
Limits
Most companies never register for an LEI, so the graph is fullest for public companies, funds, advisers and companies that trade in financial markets. A Wikidata link is community-edited and scores 0.95, not 1. The UK counts include every registered body, not just companies, and a registered office is often an accountant's or agent's address. Companies House did not publish a June 2025 snapshot, so two months of UK removals are missing.
Source
GLEIF (CC0), Wikidata (CC0), the SEC, USAspending and the USPTO (public domain), Form ADV filings (from 2025 BrokerCheck data, subject to the BrokerCheck Terms of Use, https://brokercheck.finra.org/terms) and Companies House (contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0). Report errors to support@palanor.com.