How to check a director's verification status before you sign, lend, or appoint

Checking a director's verification status is not just something the company itself needs to do before filing - it is a useful signal for anyone else about to do business with them. Here is how to check, what the results mean, and how much weight to put on them.

Why would you check someone else's verification status?

Because it is a live signal about a company's compliance health: due diligence before signing a contract, extending credit, or appointing a director all benefit from knowing whether the people running the other side have verified who they are. It sits alongside the checks you would already run - director history, filing history, County Court Judgments - as one more data point on whether a company is being run properly.

What are the possible statuses, and what does each one mean?

Verified (a verification date is shown against the officer), Unverified (no date - verification is outstanding), and Unknown (the officer was appointed before ECCTA data started flowing, which is not the same as confirmed non-compliance). A good checker (and our ECCTA verification checker) reports these three states distinctly rather than lumping "unknown" in with confirmed unverified persons - see our guide on what an unverified status actually means.

How current is the status you are looking at?

The public Companies House register updates as verifications complete, but it is not instantaneous - if you need a status that is checked on a fixed cycle rather than relying on a manual re-look, an API or webhook feed is the more reliable source. Registrum's compliance API returns the full snapshot as JSON on request, and webhooks can notify your system when a company's verification status changes, checked on a 6-hour cycle - useful for KYB onboarding flows and ongoing monitoring rather than a one-off look-up.

What should you do if the check shows an unverified director?

It is not automatically a red flag before 18 November 2026 - millions of legitimate directors are still working through verification - but it is worth asking the company directly, and worth re-checking closer to a filing or completion date. What matters more is the direction of travel: an unverified director six months before their filing date is routine; the same status the week before completion on a deal is worth a direct question.

How do you check more than one company at once?

Checking companies one at a time does not scale past a handful - Registrum's free portfolio scan runs a whole list in one pass and ranks the results by risk, so you can prioritise which relationships to chase first. If you file, lend to, or contract with more than a handful of companies, our guide for accountants managing a client book covers building and maintaining that list.

Send us your company list and get back a gap report showing every unverified director, ranked by confirmation statement date, before you find out the hard way.