Finding companies across Europe: BRIS, VIES, TED and national registers

Propler and Europe

Propler does not offer pan-European company search. Today, Propler covers Norway: our company data comes from Norway's Enhetsregisteret, and we read public tenders from TED where the buyer is Norwegian. Sweden, the UK and France are not available. This page is a guide to the European tools you can use yourself.

Why there is no "European company register"

Company law and registration are national. Each country decides what its register holds, which identifiers it uses, what is free and what is paid. A Norwegian organisation number has nine digits, a Swedish organisationsnummer ten, a French SIREN nine and a UK company number eight characters, and none of them can be converted into the others. Any cross-border list therefore needs a "country plus national ID" key.

The EU has narrowed the gap in two ways: by connecting the national registers, and by requiring basic company data to be published as open data.

BRIS: searching national registers from one place

The Business Registers Interconnection System (BRIS), set up under Directive 2012/17/EU, links the national business registers of the EU member states with those of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Its public face is the Find a company search on the European e-Justice Portal.

You can search by company name or registration number. The results show basic details, and you can then see the documents a register makes available, such as articles of association, annual accounts and legal representatives. The information is fetched in real time from each national register. Two limits matter in practice:

• BRIS only lets you download documents that the connected country makes available free of charge. Paid documents still have to be bought from the national register.
• It is a lookup tool, not a prospecting tool. You cannot filter all of Europe by industry or size.

VIES: checking a VAT number

VIES (VAT Information Exchange System) is the European Commission's tool to check whether a VAT number issued by an EU member state is valid for cross-border trade. It is a search engine rather than a database: each query goes to the national VAT database.

Whether you see the company's name and address depends on the member state. If the number is valid but the name is shown as dashes, that country does not allow the details to be displayed. The result still confirms the number is valid. VIES is ideal for checking a new customer or supplier before you invoice, but it is not a way to discover companies.

TED: public tenders across Europe

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) is the online version of the Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU, and gives free access to public procurement notices from the EU, the EEA and beyond. Contracts above the EU thresholds must be published there; national portals carry smaller contracts. In Norway, public buyers publish on Doffin, and contracts above the EEA thresholds are also published on TED.

For a seller, TED is one of the best signals of concrete demand: an open tender is a buyer telling you what it needs and when. For supplier discovery, award notices show who won similar contracts.

Open data: the high-value datasets rule

The EU's Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 lists "companies and company ownership" as a category of high-value datasets. It covers basic company information such as name, status, registration number, legal form, registered address and activity code, as well as company accounts. Public bodies covered by the rules must make these datasets available free of charge, through APIs and, where relevant, bulk download. Implementation varies: some registers are fully open, others still charge for parts of their data.

Sweden's free API for basic company data is one example of this rule in practice; see Sweden. Norway's Brønnøysund has published open register data for years; see Norway.

Country by country

The national registers are where the depth is:

• Norway: Enhetsregisteret and Regnskapsregisteret at Brønnøysundregistrene, open data under NLOD.
• Sweden: Bolagsverket for legal registration and annual reports, SCB for the business register and workplaces. See Sweden.
• United Kingdom: Companies House, with a free API. The UK is outside the EU and its register is not connected to BRIS. See United Kingdom.
• France: INSEE's Sirene for SIREN/SIRET, INPI's RNE for legal data and accounts. See France.

Prospecting across borders

1. Pick one or two countries and learn their register first. A shallow list across ten countries is less useful than a good one in two.
2. Normalise industry codes: most national systems are based on NACE, but national versions differ and are being revised.
3. Expect different financial transparency. Small UK companies may not file a profit and loss account, and small French companies can keep accounts confidential.
4. Check legal status in the national register before you contact anyone.

Our guide to business opportunities in Scandinavia looks at the Nordic neighbours.

GDPR and marketing rules

The GDPR applies across the EU and EEA whenever you process data about a named person, including sole traders. The rules for unsolicited e-mail to businesses are national, however, and differ. In Norway and Sweden, electronic marketing to natural persons requires prior consent; France's CNIL allows B2B prospecting by e-mail based on legitimate interest if the message relates to the recipient's job and they can easily object; the UK has its own PECR rules. Check the rules of the recipient's country before every campaign.