In the UK companies are required every year to file a confirmation statement (Companies House form CS01), in this document a company confirms a number of things including details of its directors and shareholders.

The confirmation statement for any company is publically available on the companies house and can be used to identify the shareholders of any UK company.

A company could have millions of shares and hundreds of shareholders so the share register could be quite long! Here's an example of just one page:

You can see that shareholder one has 3,516 "A Ordinary" shares. Is this a lot? We don't know. The confirmation statement just gives you the information but doesn't add up the total number of shares. This is where we can use findashareholder.co.uk!

findashareholder.co.uk analyses the shareholder register for you by using machine learning to read all the pages. You can then see a summary of all the different shareholders and share classes:

A table showing the amount of shares each shareholder has in each share class:

And then what the share class definitions are:

This only works for companies that have filed their confirmation statement electronically. We haven't worked out a way (yet!) of reading a handwritten form.

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