Companies House identity verification and what an ACSP actually does

Why the rules changed

For most of its history the UK register accepted whatever it was told. You could register a company in a name that had never been checked against a single document. That openness made the UK easy to start a business in, and equally easy to abuse — thousands of companies were incorporated to fictitious people at addresses that had no idea.

The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act rewired that. Companies House moved from a passive filing library to a body with the power to check, query and reject, and identity verification became the foundation of it. The register is meant to tell the truth about who is behind a company, and that only works if the people on it are real and proven.

Who has to verify

Shareholders who hold 25% or less and are not directors are not required to verify. Corporate shareholders are handled differently — a relevant legal entity discloses its own details rather than verifying a face.

What an ACSP is, and why it matters to you

An Authorised Corporate Service Provider is a firm registered with Companies House and supervised for anti-money-laundering purposes, permitted to verify identities and file on behalf of clients. It is not a badge a website can award itself — it requires supervision, record-keeping and accountability for every verification carried out.

For you it removes a whole step. Instead of creating a separate Companies House account, verifying yourself there, waiting for a code and then returning to your formation, you verify once with us and we carry that confirmation into your filing. For overseas founders it is often the only practical route, because the direct process leans on documents and checks that are easier to satisfy from inside the UK.

What happens if you do not

• A new company cannot be incorporated with unverified directors or PSCs.
• An existing company's filings can be rejected, which quickly cascades into late-filing penalties.
• Acting as a director while unverified is a criminal offence for the individual, not just the company.
• Companies House can annotate the public record, which is visible to banks, clients and suppliers doing due diligence.

None of this is designed to catch out honest founders, and in practice it is a ten-minute task. The failures we see are almost always people who assumed it was optional, or who never received the notice because their registered office was a dead letterbox.