Director Network API — Map Company Connections via Shared Directors

What the director network shows

Every UK company must register its directors with Companies House. That data is public. When person A sits on the board of Company X and also Company Y, those two companies share a director — they are one degree apart in the network. If Company Y in turn shares a director with Company Z, that is two degrees from your starting point.

This graph structure reveals information that is not visible from looking at any single company record: holding structures, affiliate networks, whether a business shares management with its competitors, and whether a counterparty's directors have a track record of involvement in dissolved or struck-off companies.

The Registrum network endpoint builds this graph for any company number, traverses it to the requested depth, and returns a ranked list of connected companies. No graph database setup required on your end — it is a single HTTP call.

Use cases

• KYB (Know Your Business) checks. Before onboarding a business customer, map their full corporate network to identify related entities, beneficial owners, and any companies that share management with sanctioned or dissolved firms.
• Due diligence. An acquisition or partnership target's directors may have material involvement in other companies — competitors, conflicts of interest, or businesses with a history of regulatory issues. Surface these connections before signing.
• Fraud detection. Phoenix company patterns — where a director closes one company and immediately opens another — are visible in the director graph. So are networks of companies that share management and may be operating as a single undisclosed entity.
• Ownership research. Complex group structures are often not apparent from a single company record. Traversing two degrees of director connections frequently reveals the full group — subsidiaries, holding companies, and sister entities — that a company is part of.
• Competitive intelligence. Identify companies whose management overlaps with a competitor, revealing potential strategic relationships, shared investors, or informal coordination.

How graph traversal works

The depth parameter controls how far the traversal goes:

Results are sorted by shared_directors_count descending, so the most tightly connected companies appear first. Companies sharing three directors are more likely to be genuinely related than companies sharing one.

What the response contains

Each entry in the companies array includes the company name, number, status, and incorporation date from Companies House. The shared_directors array lists the names of the directors who create the connection, so you can immediately see which person links the two companies. The connection_depth field tells you whether a company was found at depth 1 or 2.

Example: mapping Tesco's director network

curl -H "X-API-Key: reg_live_..." \
  "https://api.registrum.co.uk/v1/company/00445790/network?depth=1"

# Response (abbreviated):
{
  "status": "ok",
  "data": {
    "company_number": "00445790",
    "company_name": "TESCO PLC",
    "depth": 1,
    "total_connections": 14,
    "companies": [
      {
        "company_number": "00519500",
        "company_name": "TESCO STORES LIMITED",
        "company_status": "active",
        "incorporated_on": "1954-04-21",
        "connection_depth": 1,
        "shared_directors_count": 4,
        "shared_directors": [
          "Ken Murphy",
          "Imran Nawaz",
          "Melissa Bethell",
          "Byron Grote"
        ]
      },
      {
        "company_number": "02947650",
        "company_name": "TESCO PROPERTY FINANCE 1 PLC",
        "company_status": "active",
        "incorporated_on": "1994-06-14",
        "connection_depth": 1,
        "shared_directors_count": 2,
        "shared_directors": [
          "Ken Murphy",
          "Imran Nawaz"
        ]
      }
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "cached": true,
    "cache_ttl_seconds": 86400
  }
}

Director data is cached for 24 hours. Large networks (depth=2 on a company with many directors) may return dozens of connected companies — use depth=1 first to understand the immediate connections before expanding the traversal.