You’ve done this dance before. You’re researching a company. You pull up UK Companies House — solid, official, trustworthy. Then someone mentions you should also check the Global LEI system. So you go there. And you find what looks like the same entity. But there’s no link. No cross-reference. No breadcrumb trail. Just you, two browser tabs, and a growing sense of dread that you might be missing something critical.
Two publicly funded transparency systems, designed to solve the exact same problem, somehow managed to make due diligence harder, not easier.
This isn’t a glitch. It’s a feature of institutional inertia.
UK Companies House and GLEIF both describe legal entities. They both exist to increase transparency. They both are funded by public money or public mandates. And yet, they operate in complete isolation — like two librarians in the same building who refuse to acknowledge each other’s catalogues.
If you’re an investor, compliance officer, analyst, or researcher, you already know the pain. You find a company in Companies House. You need its LEI. You go to GLEIF. You search by name. You get seven results that look similar. Which one is the real match? You start squinting at registered addresses, comparing director names, checking incorporation dates. One wrong click and you’ve linked the wrong entity — and now your compliance report is fiction.
The scariest part isn’t the tedium. It’s that nobody knows they’re doing it wrong until something blows up.
Here’s what most people assume: this is a hard technical problem. Data matching is messy. Entity resolution is complex. Surely the regulators would fix it if they could.
Wrong. The technical problem is trivial. Matching two records that share a company name, address, and registration number is a solved problem — it’s a weekend project for a competent developer. Which is exactly what happened.
Registrly was built by one person who noticed the gap and decided to bridge it. The tool cross-references UK Companies House and GLEIF, so when you look up a company, you get both registries linked together. No more tab-hopping. No more guesswork. No more quiet terror that you’ve missed a match.
One developer did in a few weeks what two multi-million-dollar institutions couldn’t be bothered to coordinate in over a decade.
The real root cause isn’t technical. It’s governance. Companies House is a UK government agency. GLEIF is a global foundation backed by the Financial Stability Board. They have different mandates, different stakeholders, different bureaucratic incentives. Nobody owns the problem of linking them. And in the absence of ownership, nothing happens.
This is the coordination failure that startups exist to exploit. When institutions can’t align, the market fills the gap. Registrly isn’t just a useful tool — it’s an indictment of the system that made it necessary.
Think about what that means for due diligence more broadly. How many other critical data sources are sitting in silos, unlinked, waiting for some analyst to manually bridge them? How many compliance failures are really just integration failures dressed up as human error?
Every manual cross-reference is a bet that the analyst is right and the system is fine. The system is not fine.
If you do any kind of entity research, Registrly eliminates a step that should never have existed. It’s free, it’s fast, and it exposes a problem that regulators should be embarrassed about. Use it. And the next time someone tells you the hard part of due diligence is finding the data, remember — the data was always there. The institutions just forgot to connect it.
FAQ
Q: Why haven't Companies House and GLEIF just linked their data themselves?
A: Because no single agency owns the problem. Different mandates, different stakeholders, zero shared incentive. Institutional inertia kills cross-agency projects faster than any technical challenge ever could.
Q: Is Registrly reliable enough for real compliance work?
A: It cross-references two authoritative, official registries using entity-matching logic that's well-understood. It's more reliable than a human squinting at two browser tabs. That said, always verify critical matches against the source registries for high-stakes decisions.
Q: Doesn't this just prove regulators are obsolete and startups should replace them?
A: Not quite. Regulators are essential for data collection and legal authority. They're terrible at inter-system coordination. The opportunity isn't replacing institutions — it's building the connective tissue between them that they'll never build themselves.