LEI Lookup — VAT Number Checker and Company Identity Extractor

A LEI lookup that answers the whole KYB question. Give a Legal Entity Identifier, an EU VAT number, a national registry number, a company name or a website domain, and get back the legal entity with its LEI, its registry number, its parent chain, its VAT finding and whatever annual accounts a free public register will hand over. This is the identity check that turns "who is behind this counterparty" into one canonical record you can approve or reject against.

LEI lookup: what comes back

• The GLEIF Level 1 identity: legal name, jurisdiction, national registry number (entity.registeredAs), legal form, entity status, creation date and both address blocks (legal seat and headquarters).
• GLEIF registration trust flags: registration.status (ISSUED, LAPSED, MERGED, RETIRED), nextRenewalDate, managingLou, corroborationLevel (FULLY_CORROBORATED versus ENTITY_SUPPLIED_ONLY) and the validation reference on the record.
• The joins: BIC codes, ISIN instruments, conformity flag and the registeredAt registry authority.
• GLEIF Level 2 parent chain: the direct parent and the ultimate parent, each as a full mini-record, or the reporting-exception reason when no parent is being reported (NATURAL_PERSONS, NO_KNOWN_PERSON, NON_CONSOLIDATING and the rest). Plus a count of direct children.
• EU VIES VAT validation: the valid flag, the userError code, and — when you send your own requester member state and number — the requestIdentifier consultation number that is the proof-of-check token your compliance file needs. Where the member state returns them, the row also carries the trader name and address, plus the approximate-match codes (matchName, matchCity, matchStreet, matchPostalCode, matchCompanyType) when you send candidate trader fields.
• Annual accounts from a free public register where one exists, with the source named on the row and honest nulls where it does not. UK Companies House filing history when you bring a Companies House API key. Nothing is invented and nothing is interpolated: a missing year stays missing.
• For a domain input: RDAP registration facts (registrar, registrant where published, creation and expiry dates, nameservers, status codes) plus the site's own title and a couple of trivial technology hints.

Why scrape company identity

Compliance teams onboard sellers and suppliers from a webshop domain or a marketplace handle. The registers that answer the question are split: GLEIF holds the legal entity and its ownership chain, the EU VIES service holds the VAT finding, the national registries hold the accounts, and RDAP holds the domain. Nobody joins them for you. A VAT number on its own says a seller is registered; it does not say who owns them or whether the LEI on their invoice is still ISSUED.

The decision this changes is binary. A marketplace that checks a seller puts the VIES answer on the file — valid: true, with the trader name and address where the member state returns them — while the same row shows GLEIF with no parent chain and a registration that has lapsed, so the account goes to enhanced due diligence instead of straight through. A comparative score ("97% of sellers validated") changes nothing in that moment. The joined row does.

Input

Field	Required	What it does
lei	one of these	20-character Legal Entity Identifier, exact record lookup
vat_number	one of these	EU VAT number with a two-letter member state prefix (LU26375245). The prefix is stripped before the VIES call; the prefix is required — bare national digits such as 26375245 are refused, and jurisdiction is not used as a fallback member state
registered_as	one of these	National registry number: Dutch KvK, German HRB, UK company number
company_name	one of these	Legal name for the GLEIF name search when you have no identifier
domain	one of these	Website domain. Adds RDAP and the site title, and can seed the name search
jurisdiction	optional	Two-letter country code that narrows fuzzy name search and decides which accounts register to consult
company_number	optional	Companies House number for the UK accounts door
fiscal_year	optional	Fiscal year to look for in the accounts register
requester_member_state_code	optional	Your own member state code
requester_number	optional	Your own VAT number. With the requester member state this is what makes VIES return a consultation number

Give at least one of the five identifiers. The actor resolves whichever you gave and enriches the row with whatever else it can reach.

Output

One row per entity. This is a real run: the input was one LEI, H1FJE8H61JGM1JSGM897. Trimmed to the fields that matter here:

{
  "lei": "H1FJE8H61JGM1JSGM897",
  "legal_name": "Koninklijke Philips N.V.",
  "jurisdiction": "NL",
  "registered_as": "17001910",
  "legal_form_id": "B5PM",
  "entity_status": "ACTIVE",
  "creation_date": "1912-09-10T22:00:00Z",
  "registration_status": "ISSUED",
  "next_renewal_date": "2027-06-26T09:11:11Z",
  "managing_lou": "724500A93Z8V1MJK5349",
  "corroboration_level": "FULLY_CORROBORATED",
  "bic": ["KOPLNL2EXXX"],
  "isins": [
    "US718448AD51", "NL0000009538", "NL0014275422", "US500472AE51",
    "US500472AC95", "NL0015073VN5", "US5004723038"
  ],
  "direct_parent": null,
  "direct_parent_reporting_exception": {
    "category": "DIRECT_ACCOUNTING_CONSOLIDATION_PARENT",
    "reason": "NO_KNOWN_PERSON"
  },
  "direct_children_count": 15,
  "vat_number": "017001910B01",
  "vies": {
    "valid": false,
    "request_identifier": null,
    "name": null,
    "address": null,
    "vat_derived_from_registry_id": true,
    "trader_match_codes": {"match_name": "NOT_PROCESSED"}
  },
  "jaarcijfers": {
    "source": "nl_public_registers",
    "available": false,
    "reason": "no free machine-readable per-company figure door in NL; KVK extracts are a paid product. registry id returned so the caller can purchase the extract",
    "registry_id": "17001910",
    "filings": []
  },
  "sources": ["gleif", "vies"],
  "completeness": {"gleif": true, "vies": true, "jaarcijfers": false, "domain": false}
}

Fields that no register could supply come back null or with an explicit reason, never with a plausible-looking guess. The valid: false above is an honest answer, not a broken run: no VAT number was supplied, so the actor built the standard Dutch form from the registry id, VIES refused that construction, and the row says so — vat_derived_from_registry_id is true and user_error is INVALID. Send a real VAT number instead and the block carries what the member state answered for it. From a run with LU26375245 supplied:

"vies": {
  "member_state": "LU",
  "vat_number": "26375245",
  "valid": true,
  "user_error": "VALID",
  "name": "AMAZON EUROPE CORE S.A R.L.",
  "address": "38, AVENUE JOHN F. KENNEDY\nL-1855  LUXEMBOURG",
  "request_identifier": null,
  "vat_derived_from_registry_id": false
}

VAT number checker: what the VIES answer contains

A VAT number checker has one question — is this number registered, and with whom — and the row answers it with the evidence around it rather than a bare flag. Send the number and the block carries member_state, vat_number as the service saw it, valid, user_error, and the consultation number when you asked for one. Where the member state publishes them it also returns the trader name and address, which is how you catch a number that is valid for a company with a different name than the one on the invoice. The approximate match codes (matchName, matchCity, matchStreet, matchPostalCode, matchCompanyType) say which of those fields were compared and what came back, so an empty name reads as "not disclosed", not as "no match".

What a VAT number checker cannot do on its own, this row does next to it: the same record carries the LEI, the registry number and the parent chain, so the validity flag and the identity it belongs to can never drift apart in your file.

What to expect from the check itself:

• LU26375245 is accepted and normalised to the bare national digits; the two-letter prefix is required. Bare national digits without it, and sending the country prefix twice, are the forms the service refuses.
• The consultation number only appears when you also send requester_member_state_code and requester_number. Without them VIES still validates, it just does not issue a proof-of-check token.
• Member states differ on what they disclose. Some return trader name and address; some strip both; Spain answers through approximate matching only. The row reports what came back and leaves the rest null.
• VIES rate-limits concurrency per member state and signals it inside the response body rather than with an HTTP status. The actor reads that, treats it as a retry and never records it as an INVALID result. If a member state stays busy you get a user_error of MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ with valid: null — re-run it.
• No VAT number given? The actor builds the standard Dutch form from a KvK number (17001910 → NL017001910B01), checks it and reports what came back, including valid: false, with vat_derived_from_registry_id: true so you can tell a derived check from one you asked for. When you hold the real VAT number, send it.

Use cases

Marketplaces and B2B payment platforms onboarding sellers. A seller signs up with a webshop domain. The actor resolves the domain to a legal entity, returns the LEI and the registry number, checks the VAT number and stamps the consultation number into the onboarding file, and shows the parent chain so the compliance officer can see whether the seller is a subsidiary of a group you already know. One call replaces five register lookups and a spreadsheet.

Distributors and PE/M&A teams resolving counterparties before money moves. Give the target's legal name and jurisdiction, get the LEI, the registration status, the renewal date and the ownership chain. A lapsed LEI or a FULLY_CORROBORATED absence of parents is a finding you can act on, not a metric.

Credit teams sizing a counterparty from its last filed year. Start from the business registration lookup: point the actor at a UK company number and bring a Companies House key; the filing history comes back attached to the right legal entity rather than to a name string. Where no free register publishes figures, the row says so and hands you the registry id so you can buy the extract.

Brand and grey-import checks. A listing claims to be an authorised distributor of brand B. The LEI record either sits inside brand B's ownership chain or it does not. The direct-children count and the parent links are what settle it.

How it compares

	This actor	LEI-only lookup actors	Standalone VAT checkers
GLEIF L1 + L2 identity	yes	yes	no
Parent chain + reporting exceptions	yes	sometimes	no
VIES validation + consultation number	yes	no	yes
Trader name and address where returned	yes	no	sometimes
Annual accounts where free	yes	no	no
Domain / RDAP resolution	yes	no	no
One joined row instead of two exports	yes	no	no
Price per 1k rows	$6.00	from $2.00	from $5.00

The price row quotes pay-per-event Store rates measured on 24 September 2026: a LEI record from $0.002, a VAT check from $0.005 at the entry tier, this actor $0.006 for the joined row. Several free actors in both columns charge only for compute and hand back a single-register answer, which is a different product, not a cheaper version of this one.

The LEI-only lookups on the Store are cheaper per record and should be your pick if all you want is a single LEI. The standalone VAT checkers are cheaper per check and should be your pick if all you want is a validity flag. This actor exists for the join: one row that carries the VAT finding and the legal identity and the ownership chain together, so the two answers can never drift apart in your file.

Pricing

$0.006 per identity row. All pricing is pay-per-event — you only pay for results you receive. No actor-start fee, no per-compute-unit charges.

Limits and gotchas

• Give at least one identifier. A run with nothing to resolve fails fast with bad_input rather than returning an empty row.
• The VAT checks are the finicky half: see the section above for normalised prefixes, consultation numbers, per-member-state disclosure and the concurrency signal you may have to re-run.
• Annual accounts coverage is uneven by design. The UK door needs a Companies House API key in the environment. The NL door reports honestly that no free machine-readable per-company figure source exists rather than filling the gap with an estimate.
• Name search is fuzzy. When you have an LEI, a registry number or a VAT number, use it; a name alone can land on a similarly named entity, so check registered_as and jurisdiction on the row before trusting it.
• Cold start is a few seconds. The registers are queried live; there is no stale cache standing between you and the current record.

FAQ

Can I look up a company by LEI and get its VAT number in one call? Yes. Give the LEI. The actor fetches the GLEIF record, derives the Dutch VAT form from the registry number where the jurisdiction allows it, checks it against VIES and puts the identifier and the VIES answer on the same row. Add your own requester member state and number if you also want the consultation number.

Does a GLEIF record contain a VAT number? No. The LEI record has no tax-number field at all. The join from entity.registeredAs to a VAT identifier is the part this actor does for you, and the VIES result is what proves the join landed on a real registration.

What is a VIES consultation number and why do I need one? requestIdentifier, the consultation number, is the token the EU service issues to the requester as proof a specific check happened at a specific time. Your compliance file wants that token next to the finding. You only get one by sending your own requester member state and number.

How do I find the ultimate owner of a company from its LEI? The row carries ultimate_parent as a mini-record. When there is no ultimate parent being reported, ultimate_parent_reporting_exception gives the category and reason instead of a silent null, so you can tell "not disclosed" apart from "not looked up".

Can this actor give me annual accounts for a Dutch BV? Not the figures. No free public register publishes per-company Dutch annual accounts as machine-readable data. The row returns the registry id and an explicit reason so you can buy the extract. The UK door does return filing history when you bring a Companies House key.

Related Actors

• https://apify.com/s-r/leaktix
• https://apify.com/s-r/backlinks-checker
• https://apify.com/s-r/google-shopping-search-scraper