The GBRIS API Explained: How Compliance and Fintech Teams Access 11 Business Registries in One Call

If your team verifies companies across multiple countries, you already know the routine. You open the German Handelsregister, search in Italian, navigate a Polish registry that was last redesigned in 2009, and somewhere along the way you request a document that arrives as a scanned PDF in a language nobody on your team reads. Two days later, you have half the information you needed.

This is not a process problem. It’s an infrastructure problem. And it’s what the GBRIS API was built to solve.

What Is the GBRIS API?

The GBRIS API is a unified interface that gives compliance teams, fintech platforms, and legal professionals programmatic access to structured legal entity data from 11 business registries, through a single integration.

Currently supported jurisdictions: Germany, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and India, with new registries added on a rolling basis.

Instead of building and maintaining separate connections to each national registry, your system sends one request and receives a standardized, machine-readable response: company name, legal form, registration status, address, identifiers, and available official documents.

In practical terms: one API call replaces what used to be a multi-tab, multi-language, multi-day manual process.

Who It’s For

The GBRIS API is designed for teams that deal with company verification at scale:

• Compliance and AML teams running KYC checks on counterparties, clients, or suppliers across jurisdictions
• Fintech platforms that need to verify businesses as part of onboarding flows
• Legal and M&A teams conducting due diligence on entities in multiple countries
• Procurement and B2B platforms that need to validate vendors before contract execution
• SaaS developers building compliance or business intelligence tools who need reliable company data as a foundation

If verifying a foreign company currently involves a human being, a browser, and a spreadsheet, the API is built for your use case.

How Teams Use It

These are the most common integration patterns we see in practice.

Entity Lookup and Verification

A single API call with a company name or registration number returns the canonical legal entity record: current status, registered address, and identifiers. This is the foundation for KYC checks, onboarding flows, and supplier verification, anywhere you need to confirm that a company is real, active, and correctly identified.

Data Enrichment and CRM Sync

Because the response schema is consistent across all supported jurisdictions, you can periodically poll the API and write fresh registry data (legal name, address, officers, status changes) directly into your CRM or ERP. No country-specific parsing logic required. Your records stay current without manual updates.

Deduplication via Persistent IDs

GBRIS assigns a stable Persistent ID to each real-world legal entity, even when that entity appears under slightly different names or holds registrations in multiple jurisdictions. You can match your internal records against these IDs to find and merge duplicates programmatically, something that string matching alone cannot reliably do.

B2B Checkout and Form Auto-Fill

Hit the search endpoint as a user types a company name, present matching results inline, and on selection populate the legal name, VAT number, and registered address into the form automatically. One request replaces manual entry and gives you a verified counterparty from the start of the transaction.

Cross-Border Entity Search

The country_code + query parameterization lets you search across jurisdictions through the same endpoint. Useful for platforms that need to resolve entities in multiple markets without building and maintaining separate integrations for each national registry.

Document Ordering via API

Beyond entity data, the API gives you programmatic access to official registry documents: the same incorporation certificates, annual reports, and other filings available on gbris.com, but ordered and delivered entirely within your workflow. Submit a document request via API, receive a webhook notification when the file is ready, and download it directly. No manual steps, no emails, no switching between systems. For teams that need to collect and archive official documents at scale, this removes the last remaining manual touchpoint from the verification process.

How It Works

Search Across Jurisdictions

The core endpoint allows you to search for any legal entity by name or registry identifier, with an optional country filter. The response returns everything GBRIS knows about that entity in a clean, consistent JSON format, regardless of which country the company is registered in.

A search for a German GmbH returns the same data structure as a search for an Estonian OÜ or a French SAS. Your system doesn’t need to know anything about local registry formats. GBRIS handles the translation.

Entity Resolution: One Company, One Record

The same company may appear under slightly different names in different registries, or hold multiple identifiers across jurisdictions. GBRIS resolves these into a single unified entity profile and assigns it a Persistent ID: a stable reference that doesn’t change even as underlying registry data updates.

For compliance workflows, this matters. You’re not matching strings. You’re tracking real-world legal entities.

Document Ordering, Built In

Beyond data, the API allows you to order official registry documents directly (annual reports, incorporation certificates, and other filings) without leaving your workflow. Once a document is ready, a webhook notifies your system automatically, and the file is available for download via the API.

No manual requests. No waiting rooms. No PDFs arriving by email three days later.

Why Not Just Integrate the Registries Directly?

It’s technically possible to connect directly to each national business registry. Companies do it. The tradeoff is significant:

• Each registry has its own authentication method, data format, and rate limits
• Data structures vary wildly: what Germany calls “Handelsregisternummer” is not the same field as what Italy calls “Codice fiscale”
• Registries go down, change their APIs, and update schemas without notice
• Coverage across 11 jurisdictions means 11 separate integrations to build, test, and maintain

The GBRIS API absorbs that complexity. You write the integration once, against a stable and documented interface, and coverage expands as GBRIS adds new jurisdictions.

What the Response Looks Like

A typical entity record from the API includes:

• Name and legal form, standardized using GBRIS’s classifier system (e.g., de_gmbh for German GmbH, with full metadata)
• Status: whether the company is active, dissolved, or suspended
• Identifiers: registry codes with context on which registry issued them and in which jurisdiction
• Addresses: registered legal address and, where available, operational address
• Available documents: a list of orderable official filings with price and language indicated
• Validation date: when GBRIS last verified the record against the source registry

All fields follow a consistent schema across all jurisdictions. No custom parsing required per country.

Pricing

API pricing is straightforward: €0.02 per request. No setup fee, no subscription, no minimum commitment.

This matters more than it might seem. Most competing registry data APIs come with at least one of the following: an upfront setup fee before you’ve made a single call, a monthly subscription that runs whether you use the API or not, or minimum volume tiers that force you to overpay until your usage scales up.

For teams that are evaluating the API, running a pilot, or operating at variable volumes, these structures create friction before the integration has proven its value. With GBRIS, the first request costs the same as the thousandth. You’re not paying for access. You’re paying for results.

Getting Started

Access to the GBRIS API is via bearer token. Tokens are issued manually by the GBRIS team. To request access, email [email protected] with a short description of your intended use case and expected request volumes.

Full documentation (including quickstart guide, endpoint reference, and webhook setup) is available at developers.gbris.com.

For an overview of the API and pricing, visit gbris.com/gbris-api.

The Bottom Line

Cross-border company verification has always been slower and more manual than it should be. The GBRIS API doesn’t make the underlying registries simpler. It makes them irrelevant to your workflow. One integration. Standardized data. Official documents on demand.

For compliance and fintech teams that verify companies at scale, that’s not a minor improvement. It’s a different way of working.