Using the bulk data

Should I use bulk data?

We offer a hosted API to cover standard screening usecases. If the API is a good fit for your usecase, but your screening volume makes using our hosted offering impractical, check out if running our on-premise service is a better option. Both our hosted API and our on-premise service integrate offer a entity matching service built on top of our bulk data.

Bulk data supports advanced usecases that don't fit this model very well, such as screening a large number of entities as part of a batch job or integrating our data into an existing entity matching solution.

Understanding the data model

We use a data model focused on the notion of entities. Read our documentation on entities and how they are tagged to get started. For a full overview of all schemas, properties and their values, consult the data dictionary.

Choosing a collection

We recommend using our default collection, which aggregates information from a broad range of sources, and filtering the entities contained therein depending on your needs. Commonly, you will want to filter entities by risk topics or by datasets that they appear in. For example, to find sanctioned entities, filter for sanction in the topics property of the entity. To filter for entities that appear in on the of the US OFAC lists, filter for us_ofac_sdn or us_ofac_cons in the datasets property.

Only in very specific circumstances do we recommend using the data files from one of our datasets or collections directly. They will only contain information sourced from that specific dataset or collection of datasets, missing additional information gathered from other sources such as company registers, Wikidata and other enrichment sources. This is also true if you only want data on PEPs or sanctioned entities — in both cases, just use default. As always, our support team is happy to answer your questions. 

Data formats and updates

We produce bulk data in a variety of data formats to suit your existing tooling and the level of detail you need.

Our data is updated frequently. Consult our documentation on data updates to find out how to keep up to data and how to handle entity deletions, merges and ID changes.

If you have more questions...

...have a look at Frequently Asked Questions about the data formats model and bulk data downloads. As always, our support team is here to help and excited to work with you and answer your questions.

Licensing

You can download bulk data extracts of the database directly from this website, without any login or API key. While the bulk data files are free to use for non-commercial users, commercial use of the data requires a data license.