UBO Discovery with Unravelling

Introduction

This article will walk you through how to automatically uncover and visualize the full ownership structure of a company using the Unravelling feature in Dotfile. Unlike manual ownership research, Unravelling leverages AI-powered extraction to automatically trace corporate chains, from the main company through intermediate holding entities down to the ultimate beneficial owners.

Unravelling is ideal when you need to identify the full chain of ownership and control behind a company, including cross-border structures, nested subsidiaries, and indirect beneficial ownership. It saves compliance teams hours of manual registry lookups by automating the process of fetching, extracting, and reconciling ownership data across multiple company registries.

How It Works

When you create a case with a main company, Dotfile automatically initiates an initial ownership unravelling using any company data already purchased. The system fetches registry data, uses AI to extract ownership structures and builds an interactive graph showing all parties and their relationships.

The system recursively traces ownership chains. When a shareholder is itself a company, Dotfile can fetch that company's registry data and unravel its structure too, building a full chain from the target company down to individuals.

Building the initial graph doesn't cost you anything beyond the profile that was purchased when creating the company. You will only pay extra when you initiate the unravelling on company shareholders of the graph to uncover additional ownership layer. This can be done by clicking the "+" button on a party node.

Features

The ownership graph provides several display options to help you focus on what matters:

Ownership view: Shows ownership relationships and percentages between parties.

Control view: Shows control relationships (voting rights, board positions) between parties.

Relation type filters: Filter to show all relations, ownership only, or control only.

Clicking on a party or relation in the graph opens a side panel with detailed information organized in collapsible sections. The Findings section shows the raw data points extracted by the AI from each source.

If the party has been matched to a case entity, a link to the individual or company profile is shown. You can also create a new case entity directly from this panel. After being added to the case, you will be able to run checks on that specific entity.

Sources

By default, the Unravelling with use the company registry vendors selected for the geography of the company being unravelled. This can be edited in the Advanced setting section.

If you purchase company profiles from other vendors or documents, those new sources will be incorporated in the graph too, taking into account findings from multiple sources to pain the most accurate picture of the company's ownership structure.

Ownership Unravelling works with data from multiple company registry vendors: Companies House, Pappers, INPI, Creditsafe, Kompany, Kyckr, Info Camere, Topograph, InfoCamere, TransparenzRegister and more.