Companies House Identity Verification: What It Means for UK Businesses

From November 2025, Companies House will require identity verification (IDV) for all directors, PSCs, and company secretaries. Learn what this means for you and how Creditsafe helps you track verification status directly within a company credit report.

As part of the UK government’s drive to improve corporate transparency and reduce economic crime, Companies House is introducing mandatory identity verification (IDV) for everyone involved in running or managing a UK company.

These reforms, part of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, aim to make the UK company register more accurate, secure, and trustworthy.

The UK Companies House register has long struggled with inaccurate and duplicate director records. Companies House itself admits it “does not verify the accuracy of information filed”, meaning anyone could register as a director without identity checks. This has led to duplicate entries where the same person appears multiple times under slightly different names or addresses. For example, “John A Smith” and “John Smith.” Of over 10 million director records, around 600,000 were duplicates, leaving roughly 9.5 million unique profiles (tilores.io).

Duplicates happen because company registration is quick and inexpensive, but without verified identities, even small variations in a director’s details create separate records. Duplicate records make it harder to perform due diligence and risk assessments, since not all of a person’s business activities are visible under one profile. This fragmentation also complicates anti-money laundering (AML) checks and other compliance processes, as one individual could be associated with several unconnected records.

The upcoming Companies House identity verification reforms aims to change this. Directors, PSCs, and filing agents will confirm their identity, creating unique, traceable profiles across all companies. This should reduce the number of duplicates, improve data accuracy, strengthen transparency, and enhance fraud prevention, delivering a cleaner, more reliable register for businesses, regulators, and the public.

Companies House Identity Verification (IDV) is a new process that ensures every individual linked to a UK company, including directors, company secretaries, and People with Significant Control (PSCs), can be verified as genuine.

To help businesses monitor these changes and maintain compliance, Creditsafe is introducing a new feature that shows whether company directors and PSCs have completed identity verification with Companies House.

This verification information will be visible on:

• Director and Secretary summary pages
• Full company reports
• PSC reports

Each individual’s verification status will show one of three values:

It is important to highlight that “No” does not automatically mean fraud. It simply indicates that the person has not provided their IDV code to Companies House by the deadline.