Beneficial Owners

This article documents how Strise determines beneficial owners.

Strise identifies beneficial owners from two kinds of source, and each beneficial owner carries the reason(s) that qualified them. A person can be matched by more than one reason at once — all qualifying reasons are shown, none suppress another.

• Official registers — where a jurisdiction maintains a beneficial-owner register, Strise uses it directly. These reasons record what the register declares, under each jurisdiction’s own statutory criteria (for example, the UK PSC test of significant control — broadly, more than 25% of shares or voting rights, or other control).
• Computed reasons — where Strise derives beneficial owners itself from the ownership chart and role holders, using the thresholds described below.

Which source applies depends entirely on the market — see Market support. Norway is the only market where Strise computes the full set of ownership, path, and voting-power reasons; the other markets lean on their official registers, with a narrower computed reason layered on top.

Register-based reasons

Computed reasons

Ownership, Path, and their family variants use a strict greater-than: exactly 25.000% does not qualify. Voting power uses an inclusive ≥ 0.5, matching the legal test of “controls at least half of all winning coalitions.” Note that computed Voting power (the Banzhaf index, Norway) is distinct from the register-based Voting rights reason (registered voting rights, Denmark).

Market support

The reasons available in each market are fixed by that market’s data sources — not every reason is computed everywhere. This is the authoritative matrix:

¹ Norway’s register beneficial owners come from the Brønnøysund register of beneficial owners (reelle rettighetshavere), fetched through delegated access rather than the computed pipeline — see Beneficial Owners from Brønnøysund. Everything else in the Norway column is computed by Strise. ² The UK register reason is the PSC register (persons with significant control); UK additionally gets the traced Ultimate PSC reason. ³ Denmark’s Role reason is a fallback: it applies only to companies that have no registered beneficial owner in the CVR register.

The family-aggregated reasons and the Folkeregisteret cross-reference depend on grouping relatives together, which Strise only does for Norway — so in practice family grouping is Norway-only.

Register

Applies to: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, United Kingdom.

Where a jurisdiction maintains an official beneficial-owner register, Strise records the owners it declares. The register reason reflects the register’s own content and statutory criteria — Strise does not re-derive it from shareholding.

• Norway — the Brønnøysund register of beneficial owners (reelle rettighetshavere), fetched through delegated access. This is set up per team and is documented separately in Beneficial Owners from Brønnøysund.
• Sweden and Finland — the national beneficial-owner data supplied through Strise’s data provider.
• Denmark — the CVR reelle ejere (real owners) declarations.
• United Kingdom — the PSC register (persons with significant control). Directly recorded PSCs carry the Register reason; see also Ultimate PSC.

Ultimate PSC

Applies to: United Kingdom.

The UK PSC register records control at each company individually, so a person who controls a company through one or more intermediate UK companies is not listed directly on the target company. The Ultimate PSC reason fills that gap: Strise walks up the chain of PSC relationships and reports the ultimate individual(s) with significant control, carrying the traced path as evidence. A person recorded directly on the company appears under Register; a person reached only by tracing through intermediate companies appears under Ultimate PSC.

Voting rights

Applies to: Denmark.

The CVR register records voting rights separately from ownership, including where they attach to particular share classes. Where CVR declares an owner’s voting rights, Strise surfaces them under the Voting rights reason. This is a registered figure taken from CVR — it is not the computed Banzhaf Voting power reason, which only applies to Norway.

Ownership

Applies to: Norway, United Kingdom.

A person qualifies as a beneficial owner when their summed indirect shareholding in the company exceeds 25%. Indirect shareholding is computed by walking the ownership chart upward from the company through every chain of intermediate owners, multiplying shares along each chain, and summing the results per person across all chains that lead back to them. Intermediate companies are never themselves surfaced as beneficial owners — only individuals are.

Ownership (family)

Applies to: Norway.

The Ownership computation is repeated with an additional step: before comparing against the 25% threshold, each person’s indirect shareholding is summed together with every other member of their identified family group (see Family identification below). This catches structures where a company is deliberately split across relatives so that no individual crosses 25% alone, but the family collectively controls more.

Path

Applies to: Norway.

Path looks at the chain of shareholders between the company and a person, rather than that person’s overall indirect stake. It identifies a person as a beneficial owner when there is a chain of holdings running from the company up to them in which every link is above 25%, and the chain passes through at least one intermediate company (so the person is not a direct shareholder).

This is a different test from Ownership. Ownership multiplies the shares along each chain and sums the result, so a long chain can dilute below 25% even when each individual step is large. Path instead asks whether each step in the chain individually exceeds 25% — capturing a person who controls the company through an unbroken chain of >25% holdings, even where the multiplied-through figure would not. A direct >25% shareholder is always reported under Ownership, never under Path.

When more than one qualifying chain exists to the same person, Strise reports a single canonical path: the shortest chain, and if there’s a tie, the chain with the largest cumulative share.

Path (family)

Applies to: Norway.

Same rule as Path, but run on ownership charts where every family-group member’s edges have been merged into a single representative node first, mirroring Ownership (family).

Voting power

Applies to: Norway.

Ownership percentage does not always equal control. A shareholder with a small stake can be pivotal if the remaining shares are split in a way that makes their vote necessary to reach a majority. Strise measures this using the Banzhaf Power Index: the proportion of all possible “winning” voting coalitions in which a given shareholder’s vote is decisive (i.e. removing their vote would flip the outcome from passing to failing).

A person whose Banzhaf Power Index is 0.5 or higher is reported as having Voting power — they are pivotal in at least half of all possible coalitions, which Strise treats as equivalent to effective control.

Worked example

Company X has three shareholders:

• Shareholder A: 45.8%
• Shareholder B: 44.4%
• Shareholder C: 9.8%

Despite holding only 9.8% of the shares, Shareholder C has a Banzhaf Power Index of 0.50. Neither A nor B can reach a majority alone — each needs C’s vote to pass any resolution. C’s voting power is therefore equal to the two much larger shareholders, and C qualifies as a beneficial owner through the Voting power rule despite failing the 25% Ownership test.

Unequal share classes

Some companies issue share classes with voting rights that don’t match their economic share (for example, a non-voting preference share class). Where Strise has data confirming a share class carries different voting weight than its ownership percentage, that weight is factored into the voting-power calculation before the Banzhaf index is computed — a share class marked as carrying no votes contributes nothing to its holder’s voting power, regardless of its economic size. This adjustment applies only to Voting power and Voting power (family); it has no effect on the Ownership or Path calculations, which are based on economic share regardless of voting rights.

Voting rights can also be corrected through editing: when you edit a company’s share-class voting rights in Strise, the updated weights feed straight into this calculation, so an edit can change each owner’s voting power — and therefore who qualifies as a beneficial owner under the Voting power reason.

Voting power (family)

Applies to: Norway.

Same rule as Voting power, except every person is treated as casting their vote jointly with every other member of their family group — the family’s combined block is flipped together when testing whether a coalition is winning. This captures family-controlled companies where no single relative reaches 0.5 alone, but the family unit does.

Family identification

Applies to: Norway (the family-aggregated reasons are only computed there).

The family-aggregated reasons rely on grouping relatives together. Strise does this using a name and address heuristic:

• Persons sharing a last-name token, or sharing a registered address, are grouped together.
• Grouping is not transitive: if person A is grouped with B, and B is grouped with C, that does not automatically group A with C — only direct matches count.
• A person with no last-name or address match to anyone else in the ownership chart is not placed in a family group, and none of the *_family rules apply to them.

For Norway, this heuristic can additionally be cross-referenced against Folkeregisteret (the Norwegian National Population Register) — see below.

Folkeregisteret (Norway)

Where a team has delegated Folkeregisteret access to Strise, and Folkeregisteret-based beneficial-owner identification is enabled for the team, Strise looks up each family candidate in the Norwegian population register and, if the person is found unambiguously (exactly one match — an ambiguous or missing match is discarded, not guessed), extracts their registered family relationships:

• Spouse or partner
• Parent / child (in both directions)
• Child-in-law — inferred when person A has a registered child B, and B has a registered spouse or partner

These relationships are added to the family group used by the *_family rules, in addition to (not instead of) the name/address heuristic. Folkeregisteret data only ever supplements the candidate set that the ownership computation already produced — it does not independently introduce new persons, and it does not override an Ownership, Path, or Voting power result. Personal identifiers used to query Folkeregisteret are used solely to match persons and are never stored or used to update the population register.

Role

Applies to: Norway, Denmark, Finland.

Some legal forms have no meaningful shareholding to test — cooperatives, foundations, sole proprietorships, and similar structures with no share register. For these, Strise names specific role holders as beneficial owners, based on the legal form and the role they hold. A person qualifies under Role only if their (legal form, role) combination appears in the table for their market below.

Norway

At all other Norwegian legal forms (e.g. Aksjeselskap (AS)) beneficial owners come from the Ownership, Path, and Voting power reasons instead — no role there produces a Role beneficial owner.

Denmark

Denmark’s Role reason is a fallback: it applies only to companies with no registered beneficial owner in the CVR register. When a company has registered owners, they are surfaced through the Register (and, where applicable, Voting rights) reasons and the Role reason is not used.

Finland

Finland’s Role reason is a precedence cascade: at a given company, only the highest-precedence matching role produces a beneficial owner, even if the company has holders matching more than one row. Finnish beneficial owners otherwise come from the Register reason.

For example, at a general partnership a registered Partner outranks a CEO or board member — only the Partner is reported as a Role beneficial owner for that company, even if the partnership also lists a CEO.

Sweden and the UK have no Role reason. Sweden’s beneficial owners come entirely from its Register; the UK’s come from the PSC Register, Ultimate PSC tracing, and computed Ownership.

Related pages

• Beneficial Owners from Brønnøysund — how the official Norwegian UBO register is fetched, kept in sync, and reconciled with computed results.
• Folkeregister Access — how to delegate Folkeregisteret access to Strise.