The Austrian provider of global business intelligence kompany.com intends to build a blockchain-based corporate information database. The platform is supposed to optimise the process of counterparts checking.

The announcement was made at a conference held in Cardiff, UK. The event was jointly organised by the European Commerce Registers’ Forum (ECRF) and Corporate Registers’ Forum (CRF).

According to kompany.com, the distributed ledger technology will help to provide the "ultimate source" of actual and historical company information. Such a ledger based on a hybrid blockchain will help to obtain an easy-to-access, fully auditable and verifiable data on millions of companies. It will also provide a visualisation of their connections with other legal entities and individuals.

The ledger will aggregate the data from other corporate databases such as Bloomberg Global ID, Thomson Reuters PermID, LEI, EUID, REID, DUNS, and many others. The service will allow users to verify more accurately counterparts’ credibility, evaluate tax and reputational risks and conduct investment analysis. Users will be able to see affiliations between various structures.

Kompany.com was established in 2012 with a headquarter located in Vienna. It has already raised $4.3 million in capital investments during seed rounds and from angel investors. Kompany.com database covers more than 50 million companies from 80 jurisdictions.

Blockchain is often seen as an innovative technology capable of revolutionising the whole practice of database keeping. It can, for example, be implemented in a medical database in order to sign relevant documents and eliminate the risk of medicine counterfeiting. This application of the distributed ledger technology was recently proposed by two doctors, Greg Irving from the institute of public health in the University of Cambridge and John Holden, a general practitioner at Garswood Surgery, St. Helens.

Elena Platoova