B2B Lead Verifier: check your list against the official company registers

Paste a lead list, get back one row per lead saying whether the company really exists, whether it is still trading, and how sure we are that we found the right one. France, the United Kingdom and Germany. No API key needed.

Most lead lists rot. Companies close, get struck off, go into administration, change their name after a sale, or never existed as a legal entity in the first place. A scraped directory will not tell you: the listing stays up. The company register will, and this actor asks it for you, one lead at a time.

What you get for every lead

Field	What it tells you
verdict	One sentence, readable in a spreadsheet cell: "Verified, active company", "In insolvency, do not extend credit", "Company is closed", "Not found in the company register"
confidence / confidenceBand	0 to 100, and the band: verified, likely, uncertain, unverified
confidenceReasons	Every point that went into the score, in words. No black box
legalName, registryId	The registered legal entity: SIREN (France), company number (UK), HRB/HRA (Germany)
companyStatus	active, ceased, dissolved, in-insolvency
matchScore, matchType	How the name matched, and how closely
matchAlternatives	Other companies that nearly matched, when the register cannot tell them apart
insolvencyStatus, insolvencyHits	Collective procedures with their date, court and a link to the official notice
sanctionsStatus, sanctionsHits	Matches against OFAC SDN, UN, EU, UK OFSI and the US Consolidated Screening List
legalForm, incorporationDate, registeredAddress, activityCode, officers	The register's own record, so you can fix a stale CRM row
riskFlags	insolvency, closed, sanctions, address-mismatch

Where the data comes from

Country	Register	Insolvency	Key needed
France	SIRENE and the RNE, through recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr	BODACC	no
United Kingdom	Companies House	The Gazette	no (optional, see below)
Germany	Handelsregister (Registerportal)	Insolvenzbekanntmachungen	no
Everywhere	—	—	OFAC, UN, EU, UK OFSI and US CSL sanctions lists, downloaded fresh on every run

All of them are official government sources, and all of them are free. Nothing here comes from a resold third-party database, so the data is as current as the register itself.

Three ways to give it your list

Paste it:

{
  "leads": [
    { "companyName": "Decathlon France", "country": "FR", "city": "Villeneuve-d'Ascq" },
    { "companyName": "Marks and Spencer Group plc", "country": "GB" },
    { "companyName": "Zalando SE", "country": "DE", "city": "Berlin" }
  ]
}

Point it at another run's dataset (any lead scraper: Google Maps, Yellow Pages, Europages, our own lead actors). Company name, town and country are picked up from the usual field names automatically:

{ "leadsDatasetId": "aBcDeF1234567890" }

Point it at a CSV export from your CRM. Comma and semicolon files both work, and the header row names the columns:

{ "leadsCsvUrl": "https://example.com/exports/prospects.csv", "defaultCountry": "FR" }

A registration number, when you have one, skips the matching entirely and is always exact:

{
  "leads": [
    { "registrationNumber": "552120222" },
    { "companyName": "Wilko", "registrationNumber": "09563205", "country": "GB" },
    { "companyName": "Zalando SE", "registrationNumber": "HRB 158855" }
  ]
}

How the matching works, and where it can be wrong

Every lead name is normalised (accents folded, & spelled out, P.L.C. collapsed to plc), then compared against every name the register holds for a company: the legal name, the trading name and any shopfront name. BlaBlaCar is registered as COMUTO, and that is the sort of thing this handles.

The ladder, best rung first: the registration number, the exact legal name, the same words in a different order, the same name once the legal form is set aside ("Siemens AG" is "Siemens Aktiengesellschaft"), one name inside the other, and finally a typo-tolerant fuzzy match. A town or a postcode that agrees with the registered office adds points; one that clearly disagrees takes them away, because "same name, other town" is the most common way to match the wrong company on a national register.

Two things it does deliberately rather than guessing:

• It says "ambiguous" when it is. If two companies score within four points of each other, you get the best one, the runners-up, and a much lower confidence. Give the lead a town or a postcode and the ambiguity usually disappears.
• It never invents a country. A lead with no country and no clue in its domain, email or registration number is reported as "country unknown" and is not billed.

Known limits, stated plainly:

• Only France, the UK and Germany have registers here. Everything else comes back as "country not covered", free of charge.
• On the UK free path we read one page of results (20 companies). A very common name may need a postcode on the lead to be found reliably; the row says so when that happens.
• German insolvency notices are removed from the official portal six months after a proceeding ends, so a company that recovered years ago will read as clear. That is the register's rule, not ours.
• A UK insolvency notice is matched by name and then confirmed against the company number in the notice's own structured data, so a notice about a different company with the same name is dropped rather than pinned on your lead.

Do I need a Companies House API key?

No. UK leads work out of the box through the free public company search on GOV.UK.

If you already have a key (they are free from developer.company-information.service.gov.uk), put it in companiesHouseApiKey and UK leads get relevance-ranked search, SIC codes and richer status data. The key stays yours, it is never stored, and we never charge you for Companies House lookups. We do not ship a key of our own, on purpose: a shared key would be rate-limited across every user of this actor.

What you pay for

One charge per lead a register actually answered on, match or no match. A "no match" is a real answer and the reason many people run this, so it is billed.

These are free:

• leads in a country we do not cover
• leads with no usable company name
• leads where a source was unreachable and we could not answer

Platform usage is included in the price. There is nothing else to pay.

Use cases

Lead-gen agencies. Run a scraped list through this before you deliver it. "Verified against the company register" is a line item you can charge for, and a bounced list is a refund you avoid.

Sales teams. Kill the dead rows before the SDRs call them. Sort by confidence descending and work down.

Credit and finance. insolvencyStatus and insolvencyHits come straight from BODACC, The Gazette and Insolvenzbekanntmachungen, with the court and the notice link, before you extend terms.

Compliance and onboarding. Registry identity plus a sanctions screen in one run, with the source and the list date on every row.

CRM hygiene. legalName, registeredAddress and incorporationDate are the register's own values. Use them to correct records that were typed in by hand three years ago.

FAQ

How do I verify a French company by SIREN? Put the nine-digit number in registrationNumber. SIRET (fourteen digits) and an FR VAT number both work too, and all three skip name matching entirely.

Can I check if a UK company is in liquidation? Yes. companyStatus carries the Companies House status, and insolvencyHits carries the actual Gazette notices, each with its type ("Administrators appointed", "Winding-up petition"), its date and a link.

Can I check if a German company is insolvent? Yes, against Insolvenzbekanntmachungen, the official portal run by the state justice administrations. Note that the Handelsregister entry of an insolvent company often still reads "aktuell", so the register alone is not enough. Wirecard AG is the standard example, and this actor flags it correctly.

Is a BODACC "procédure de conciliation" the same as insolvency? No, and we do not treat it as one. Conciliation is a confidential preventive negotiation that healthy companies use. It appears in insolvencyHits with severity: "preventive" and does not zero your lead's score. Only collective procedures (redressement, liquidation, sauvegarde) do.

What happens if a source is down? The row says so: insolvencyStatus: "source-error" or a sanctionsListsUnavailable list, and that lead is not billed. The run finishes; it does not fail.

How many leads can one run handle? Ten thousand. French leads run at about two per second; German ones are slower, about four seconds each, because the Handelsregister is a session-based portal that has to be queried politely.

Is this GDPR-friendly? The sources are official public registers, published by governments for exactly this purpose. Directors' names appear where the register publishes them.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes. Point it at a dataset ID or a CSV URL and schedule it weekly to keep a list from going stale.

Related actors

• French Company KYC for the full French record: officers, finances, BODACC history.
• German Company KYC for the Handelsregister XJustiz extract.
• Companies House Monitor, BODACC Insolvency Monitor, UK Insolvency Monitor and German Insolvency Monitor to watch a portfolio for changes instead of checking it once.
• Sanctions & Watchlist Screener for names on their own, people included.

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