European Business Data Suite: Official Registries, One Platform
compliance · webscraping · api · europe · 7 min read
Government registries across Europe share one thing in common: they have no public API. Whether you need Polish company financials from KRS, Spanish corporate acts from BORME, Austrian insolvency data from Ediktsdatei, or French director networks from Societe.com - you’re stuck with manual portal searches. One query at a time.
This article maps out a set of Apify actors that give you programmatic access to government and semi-official business data sources in Poland, Spain, Austria and France. Every actor returns structured JSON. Every actor is pay-per-use with no subscription.
The Problem: Government Portals Without APIs
European business registries were built for citizens, not developers. Here’s what that means in practice:
- Poland’s eKRS portal requires navigating through forms, solving captchas, and downloading individual PDF/XML files for each company’s financial statements
- Spain’s BORME publishes 500+ corporate acts daily as PDFs - the official API gives you PDF URLs but not the parsed content
- Austria’s Ediktsdatei insolvency register requires an IWG license from the Ministry of Justice for API access - a bureaucratic process most companies can’t justify
- France’s Societe.com aggregates INSEE, INPI, and BODACC data with director networks and financials, but has no API - you’d need to query 3 separate government APIs and join the data yourself
- Poland’s CRBR beneficial owner register has no bulk API - you verify one NIP at a time
- Poland’s EKW land registry portal is built around an encrypted endpoint and a captcha, which is why so few tools reach it - you look up one księga wieczysta at a time, by hand
For a compliance officer running due diligence on 200 counterparties across multiple countries, this means days of manual work. For a developer building a KYC pipeline, it means writing fragile scrapers that break when portals change.
The Suite
All actors run on Apify’s serverless platform. You get an API endpoint, scheduled runs, webhooks, and structured JSON output. No infrastructure to manage.
Poland (9 Actors)
| Actor | Registry | Price/Result | Key Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| KRS Financial Statements | eKRS (ekrs.ms.gov.pl) | $0.06 (+ $0.08 per extra MB over 1 MB) | Balance sheets, income statements from official filings |
| EKW Land Registry | EKW (ekw.ms.gov.pl) | $0.01 | Property ownership, mortgages, easements across 352 courts |
| CRBR Beneficial Owners | CRBR (crbr.podatki.gov.pl) | $0.008 | UBO verification - names, citizenship, ownership % |
| KRZ Debtor Registry | KRZ (krz.ms.gov.pl) | $0.006 + $0.025/search | Bankruptcy and debt screening, plus the bankruptcy-estate asset inventory - 9 search modes |
| MSiG Court Gazette | MSiG (ems.ms.gov.pl) | $0.004 | 20+ years of bankruptcy, liquidation, merger announcements |
| KNF Financial Registry | KNF (3 registries) | $0.004 | Licensed financial institution verification - 75,000+ entities |
| BDO Waste Registry | BDO (bdo.mos.gov.pl) | $0.004 | Entity lookup in the waste register - is this company in BDO, and what is its BDO number? |
| KRS Board Members | KRS PDF extracts | $0.008 | Full board member names - the official API censors them |
Technical note on KRS Board Members: The official KRS1 API returns person names as “L******” (censored). This actor downloads the public PDF extract from the government portal, which contains full names. It’s the only way to get non-anonymized Polish company director data programmatically.
Spain (2 Actors)
| Actor | Source | Price/Result | Key Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| BORME Corporate Acts | BORME via boe.es | $0.005 | Daily corporate acts - incorporations, appointments, capital changes |
| Spain Company Directory | OpenData Registradores | $0.005 | Company profiles with NIF, officers, CNAE codes |
BORME parses the official PDFs published daily by Spain’s Registro Mercantil. It extracts structured data from 500+ daily corporate acts: new company incorporations, officer appointments and dismissals, capital increases and reductions, dissolutions and mergers.
Spain Company Directory scrapes the official Colegio de Registradores open data portal (opendata.registradores.org), which launched in 2024 but has no public API. It returns NIF, legal form, registered officers, CNAE industry codes, address, and status. Keyless, no proxy needed - the actor handles the WAF and the CAPTCHA for you.
Austria (2 Actors)
| Actor | Source | Price/Result | Key Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ediktsdatei Insolvency | edikte.justiz.gv.at | $0.005 | Bankruptcies, reorganizations, debt settlements |
| WKO Business Directory | firmen.wko.at | $0.005 | 620,000+ businesses with phone, email, website |
Ediktsdatei is the only Apify actor providing Austrian insolvency data without requiring the IWG government license. The official API at justizonline.gv.at requires “ID Austria” authentication and bureaucratic approval - this actor scrapes the public HTML pages instead.
WKO Firmen A-Z is the Austrian Chamber of Commerce’s official business directory. No API exists. This actor extracts company name, address, phone, email, website, and industry classification from 620,000+ registered businesses. Useful for B2B lead generation, market entry research, and supplier discovery.
France (1 Actor)
| Actor | Source | Price/Result | Key Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Societe.com Company Data | Societe.com | $0.005 | Directors, financials, shareholders in one profile |
Societe.com aggregates data from INSEE (SIREN/SIRET), INPI (RNE), and BODACC into combined company profiles. While individual government APIs exist (API Sirene, INPI RNE), none provide the combined director-financial-shareholder profile. This actor gives you directors with roles, simplified financials (revenue, net result), shareholders, subsidiaries, NAF code, and legal form - all in a single API call. Keyless, no proxy needed - the anti-bot layer is handled for you.
Cross-Border Due Diligence Workflow
Here’s a concrete example: your compliance team needs to screen a counterparty that operates across Poland, Spain, and Austria.
Step 1: Poland KRS Financial Statements
→ Pull their latest balance sheet and income statement
Step 2: Poland CRBR Beneficial Owners
→ Identify all beneficial owners with ownership percentages
Step 3: Poland KRZ Debtor Registry
→ Check for bankruptcy proceedings or outstanding debts
Step 4: Spain BORME Corporate Acts
→ Check for recent officer changes or capital restructuring at their Spanish subsidiary
Step 5: Austria Ediktsdatei Insolvency
→ Screen for insolvency proceedings at their Austrian branch
Step 6: Cross-reference
→ Join the data to build a complete risk profile
Running this manually across 5 different portals with different interfaces, languages, and search capabilities would take hours per counterparty. With the actors above, you can automate the entire pipeline.
Quick Start Example
Here’s how to call any actor via the Apify API:
# Example: Run BORME scraper for a specific date
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/regdata~borme-corporate-acts-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"date": "2026-04-15",
"province": "Madrid"
}'
Or use the Apify Python client:
from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("YOUR_API_TOKEN")
# Run KRS Financial Statements scraper
run = client.actor("regdata/poland-krs-financial-scraper").call(
run_input={"companyIds": ["0000012345"]}
)
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
print(f"Company: {item['companyName']}")
print(f"Total assets: {item['financialData']['totalAssets']}")
print(f"Revenue: {item['financialData']['revenue']}")
Pricing: Pay-Per-Use vs Subscriptions
Traditional European business data providers (MGBI, Bisnode/D&B, Axesor) operate on subscription models - typically hundreds or thousands of euros per month. That makes sense if you’re running thousands of queries daily. But for most compliance teams, law firms, and due diligence analysts, usage is sporadic: batch checks before a deal, periodic counterparty reviews, one-off investigations.
Pay-per-use pricing means you pay only for what you need:
- A single KRS financial statement costs $0.06 (plus $0.08 for each extra MB over the first 1 MB, for unusually large filings)
- A BORME day’s corporate acts cost $0.005 per act
- A WKO business lookup costs $0.005
Running 100 KRS financial checks costs $6.00. Running 1,000 BORME act extractions costs $5.00. No monthly commitment, no minimums.
Apify’s tiered pricing also reduces the per-result cost at higher volumes (GOLD and above), so production pipelines get cheaper as you scale.
Technical Notes
No proxy required, no API key required - every actor in the suite. You configure nothing. Where a source sits behind a WAF, a CAPTCHA, or an anti-bot layer, the actor handles the unblocking internally and that cost is already baked into the per-result price. Notes on a few:
- KRS Financial Statements - keyless, no proxy
- CRBR Beneficial Owners - keyless, no proxy
- KRZ Debtor Registry - keyless, no proxy
- MSiG Court Gazette - keyless, no proxy
- KNF Financial Registry - keyless, no proxy
- BORME Corporate Acts - plain HTTP against boe.es plus PDF parsing, no browser, no proxy
- Ediktsdatei Insolvency - keyless, no proxy
- WKO Business Directory - plain HTTP, no proxy, runs at the default memory setting
- BDO Waste Registry - plain HTTP against the registry’s JSON API, no browser, no proxy
- EKW Land Registry - keyless, no proxy
- KRS Board Members - plain HTTP against the government portal plus PDF parsing, no proxy
- Spain Company Directory - the F5/Volterra WAF and the rotation CAPTCHA are solved by the actor, no proxy or key from you
- Societe.com Company Data - the anti-bot layer is cleared by the actor, no proxy or key from you
Every actor runs on the Apify free plan.
Which Actors Should You Start With?
For compliance/KYC teams: CRBR Beneficial Owners + KRZ Debtor Registry + KRS Financial Statements. These three cover the core Polish due diligence workflow: who owns it, are they in debt, and are they financially stable.
For B2B sales teams: WKO Business Directory (620K Austrian contacts) + BORME Corporate Acts (daily Spanish new incorporations) + KRS Board Members (Polish company directors with full names).
For credit risk analysts: Ediktsdatei Insolvency (Austrian bankruptcies) + KRZ Debtor Registry (Polish debtors) + KRS Financial Statements (Polish financials).
For M&A and competitive intelligence: Societe.com (French director networks) + BORME Corporate Acts (Spanish corporate changes) + KRS Financial Statements (Polish financials).
Bottom Line
These actors exist because European government registries systematically lack public APIs. If you need programmatic access to business data from Poland, Spain, Austria, or France, and you don’t want to build and maintain fragile scrapers yourself, this suite covers the most commonly needed sources.
Every actor links to its Apify page with full documentation, input schemas, and example outputs. Try any of them with the Apify free tier - most actors work without a paid plan.
Turn this into working data. Browse the registries and use cases, or start free on Apify.
Originally published on Dev.to.