You can now see whether shares in an Australian entity are held beneficially when assessing company ownership using the Moody’s Orbis integration.

Background

The Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) requires companies to disclose whether shareholders are holding shares for their own benefit or not.

This information is useful when trying to understand those who ultimately benefit from ownership of a company.

If the shareholder is holding the shares on behalf of another person, organization, or trust, the shares are not considered beneficially held. If the shareholder is not holding the shares on behalf of another person, organization, or trust, they are considered beneficially held.

What’s changed

When you are reviewing an Australian entity using the Assess company ownership task in the portal, you can now see the Beneficial shares status field for each shareholder.

This field will only be displayed for Australian entities. Information is only available for shareholder associates.

There are three possible values:

• Beneficially held: All of the shares are held for the benefit of the shareholder.
• Non-beneficially held: At least some of the shares are held on behalf of another person, organization, or trust.
• No result: Orbis held no data indicating the beneficially held share status.

This change may need to be enabled in your Orbis configuration.

What’s out of scope

• This data cannot be leveraged in the risk model or application flows.
• We do not monitor for any changes to this information.
• The field is only displayed for Australian entities.
• Information is only available for shareholder associates; the field will not be displayed for associates of the types beneficial owners, global ultimate owners, or controlling shareholders.

Find out more

You can read more about the Moody’s Orbis integration in our help docs, and more about the beneficially held shares in the Orbis help docs.

If you would like us to enable this for you, get in touch with our Client Service team.