A directory of names, not a league table
Business2 Directory keeps one record per trading brand. Each record tries to answer four questions and nothing else: which company operates the name, in which country that company is registered, which supervisor has standing over it, and who receives money sent to it.
When a document supports an answer, the answer is entered and the document is described. When no document supports it, the field is left visibly empty. Empty fields are not an unfinished draft here. They are the most frequent result, and the one a reader most needs to see.
What you will not find
There are no scores, no stars, no awards and no "top ten" pages on this site. A score implies a measurement, and most of what can be measured about a brand with an unnamed operator is how little has been disclosed. We would rather show that directly.
There is also no investment advice. We do not tell anyone to open an account, to deposit, or to avoid doing either. What we publish is a record and a method for checking it, so that the decision belongs to the person making it.
Latest records
How to use a record
Start at the verdict card at the top of an entry. It carries a status, a one-line summary, the date the record was last checked, and a list of the things that could not be verified. If the list of unverified items is long, that is the story of the brand, and nothing further down the page will change it.
Then run the checks yourself. Every entry ends with links to public registers, and the sequence takes minutes: find the company name in the site's own terms, search the national register, then search the brand string on the warning lists. A claim that survives all three is worth something. A claim that cannot be entered into step one was never checkable in the first place.
Corrections
Records change when documents arrive. A footer naming a company, terms carrying a registration number, a statement line showing who received a payment, or a regulator's published notice will all be checked against their original source and, where they hold up, written into the row. The contact page explains how to send one, and how the directory is compiled sets out what we do with it.