GLEIF

Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) reference data: legal name, registered address, legal form, registration status, and the national register id.

Legal basis
Global LEI System under ISO 17442, overseen by the Regulatory Oversight Committee; operated by the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation.
Access method
Open REST/JSON:API — api.gleif.org. No authentication.
Format
JSON (LEI-CDF).
Cost
Free.

Machine-readable · Yes

Known issuesSnapshot only — no directors or filing history. The ISO 20275 legal-form field is a 4-character code, not a label. Cross-border groups can have several near-identical entities.

filings.xbrl.org

ESEF iXBRL annual financial reports for issuers on EU regulated markets, with the consolidated IFRS statements machine-tagged.

Legal basis
ESEF mandate — Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/815 under the Transparency Directive; mandatory for financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2020. Aggregated from national OAMs by XBRL International.
Access method
Public JSON:API — filings.xbrl.org/api. Entity resources keyed by LEI.
Format
XBRL-JSON / iXBRL (IFRS taxonomy).
Cost
Free.

Machine-readable · Yes

Known issuesCoverage is uneven by jurisdiction — strong for the Nordics, Poland, Ukraine and the Netherlands, sparse or absent for others including Germany. Concept tagging varies by filer.

Bundesanzeiger

German statutory annual financial statements (Jahresabschluss), including for GmbHs and smaller AGs where this may be the only public financial data.

Legal basis
Publication obligation under the German Commercial Code (HGB); operated by the Bundesanzeiger Verlag.
Access method
No public API — retrieved by scraping, handled by the community `deutschland` Python package.
Format
Unstructured HTML / PDF.
Cost
Free to view; some documents are paid.

Machine-readable · No

Known issuesCAPTCHA-gated and fragile; no machine-readable tags. That this source is unreliable is itself part of the fragmentation story. Not yet wired into the live profile.

Handelsregister

German commercial register entries: HRB/HRA number, legal form, registered seat, managing directors.

Legal basis
German commercial-register law; run by the Länder justice administrations.
Access method
Web interface only — no open API and no shared identifier with other registers.
Format
HTML (and register PDFs).
Cost
Mostly free to search; certified extracts are paid.

Machine-readable · No

Known issuesNo API, no LEI linkage. One of three separate German registers (with Unternehmensregister and Transparenzregister) that do not share identifiers.

Transparenzregister

Beneficial-ownership information for German entities.

Legal basis
EU Anti-Money-Laundering Directives, transposed into German law.
Access method
Access-restricted; registration required, no open API.
Format
HTML / PDF.
Cost
Access is restricted and partly paid.

Machine-readable · No

Known issuesSince the 2022 CJEU ruling on public access to beneficial-ownership registers, access has tightened further. Effectively closed to open aggregation.

ECB Data Portal & Bundesbank

Sector-level macro context: lending rates, industrial production, inflation indicators, mapped to a company's sector where possible.

Legal basis
Official statistics published by the ECB and the Deutsche Bundesbank.
Access method
Public SDMX REST APIs — data-api.ecb.europa.eu and api.statistiken.bundesbank.de. Well documented.
Format
SDMX (structured).
Cost
Free.

Machine-readable · Yes

Known issuesFully open and machine-readable, but sector mapping to an individual company is approximate. Not yet wired into the live profile.