Recital 10

(10) The legality of company law transactions, the protection of the reliability of public registers and the prevention of illegal activities require the correct and secure identification of company founders and directors, in particular, as well as the verification of their legal capacity. Therefore, for the procedures within the scope of this Directive, Member States should be allowed to provide for complementary public electronic controls of identity, legal capacity and legality. Those complementary public electronic controls could include public remote audiovisual identity controls, including electronic checks of identity photos. At the same time, reliable and up-to-date company information in registers would contribute to the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism. In particular, enhanced access to more reliable company information at Union level, including the EU Company Certificate, would facilitate the reliable identification of the customer in line with the ‘know-your-customer’ principle under the anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism rules. In addition, connecting at Union level the system of interconnection of registers (Business Registers Interconnection System – BRIS), the Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System (BORIS) and the Insolvency Registers Interconnection system (IRI), which hold important company information, would facilitate access to, and enable the carrying out of cross-checks on, that information while respecting the access regime for information in each system of interconnection.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-10-14 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.