Most compliance teams in Australia know they need to verify an entity before onboarding it. Fewer have a clear picture of what that verification actually requires, or why ABN Lookup and ASIC Connect are not sufficient for a production KYC workflow.
The short version: ABN and ACN are different identifiers maintained by different registries with different data, and a complete entity check requires both. Getting both from manual lookups is slow, inconsistent, and leaves no audit trail. Getting both from a single API call, with structured data and full lineage, is what a production compliance workflow needs.
What ABN Lookup tells you and what it does not
The Australian Business Register, administered by the ATO, is the canonical source for ABN records. An ABN lookup gives you the registered business name, entity type (company, sole trader, trust, partnership), GST registration status, and the state of registration.
What it does not give you is company-level detail. If the entity is a proprietary limited company, the ABN record will confirm it exists and is registered. It will not tell you the ACN, the registered office address, the company type, or the officeholder records. For that you need the ASIC Company Register.
This gap matters in practice. An entity presenting with an ABN that checks out on ABR is not necessarily a legitimately structured company. A dissolved company can have a valid-looking ABN in some edge cases. A business name registered to an individual is a different risk profile than a registered proprietary company, even if both have active ABNs.
What the ASIC Company Register adds
ASIC maintains the Company Register as the authoritative source for ACN records. It covers company name, ACN, registration status (registered, deregistered, under external administration), company type (public, proprietary, foreign), registered address, and officeholder records including directors and secretaries.
The registration status field is the one that matters most for KYC. A deregistered company cannot enter into contracts. A company under external administration is a materially different counterparty than one with clean registration status. These are things ABN Lookup does not surface.
ASIC publishes the Company Register as a bulk dataset on data.gov.au under CC BY 3.0 AU. The data is updated weekly. Accessing it directly means downloading and processing a large CSV file, maintaining a local copy, and building the lookup logic yourself. For a one-off check that is workable. For a production onboarding flow it is not.
Why manual lookups break under compliance requirements
The problem with ABN Lookup and ASIC Connect for production KYC is not that the data is wrong. It is that the process is manual, inconsistent, and undocumented.
A compliance analyst running a manual check produces no structured record of what was checked, what was returned, and when the check was performed. If your internal audit team or your regulator asks for evidence that you verified a counterparty's registration status at the time of onboarding, a screenshot or a note in a CRM is not the same as an audit log entry.
A production KYC workflow needs a structured result: entity name, ABN, ACN, registration status, entity type, GST status. This result is returned in a consistent schema on every call, with a timestamp and a request ID attached, so the check is traceable and reproducible.
What the Tech Compass AU Entity Intelligence API provides
The AU Entity Intelligence API combines ABR and ASIC Company Register data in a single call. You pass an ABN or ACN, you get back a structured response covering the full entity picture: business name, ABN, ACN, entity type, GST registration status, company registration status, company type, registered address, and a KYC risk signal.
The KYC signal is derived from ASIC status codes. A deregistered company returns a HIGH risk flag. A company under external administration returns HIGH. Active registration with clean status returns LOW. This is not a credit score or a judgement. It is a structured signal derived directly from the regulatory source data, designed to feed into your onboarding logic without manual interpretation.
Every response includes the data lineage block: source references for both ABR and ASIC, the data freshness timestamp for each source, and a request ID linking to an immutable audit log entry. The ABR component uses live lookups. The ASIC component is refreshed weekly from the data.gov.au bulk dataset.
Relevant use cases
Entity verification at onboarding is the primary use case. Supplier due diligence for procurement teams that need to confirm a vendor is a legitimately registered entity before entering a contract. Counterparty checks for financial services firms before executing transactions. Regulatory reporting where ABN or ACN verification is a documented requirement.
The API is also used by platforms that need to verify entities at scale: onboarding flows that process hundreds of entities per month and cannot do that manually without creating a compliance documentation backlog.
Pricing and access
Free tier covers 10,000 calls per month with no credit card required. Professional plan is AUD 2,250 per month and includes the full SLA, audit logging, and compliance pack.
Documentation is at api.techcompass.com.au/docs. The compliance pack includes data lineage documentation for both ABR and ASIC sources and a pre-filled vendor questionnaire response suitable for submission to your vendor risk team.
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Free tier covers 10,000 calls per month. No credit card required.
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