Stephen Abbott-Pugh’s career does not follow a straight line, and that is exactly what makes it so relevant to today’s registry and transparency challenges.
“I started off my life as a journalist,” he says, reflecting on a journey that began in student newsrooms and local reporting before moving into some of the most influential digital and data-driven environments in the world.
After university, Stephen worked in local journalism covering an entire London borough before joining The Guardian, where he spent seven years at a time when digital journalism was being reinvented. He was part of a small project team experimenting with social media, APIs, data, and new forms of storytelling.
“It was a period of open journalism,” he recalls. “The Guardian was talking about how a small UK organisation could be a liberal voice for the world. We were constantly trying new things.”
This included working on high-profile data-driven projects such as the WikiLeaks US Embassy cables and experimental initiatives that blended audience data, APIs, and storytelling. One of his favourite projects involved analysing which long-form stories readers spent the most time with and automatically republishing them into a physical newspaper that people could read in a café.
“I have always loved writing,” he says, “but I have also always been fascinated by what you can do once you get hold of some data.”
That fascination followed him into his next role at the UK Parliament, where he led project managers responsible for parliamentary digital services. There, the contrast between innovation and institutional inertia became clear.
“The Guardian was way ahead,” he notes. “Parliament publishes huge amounts of information, but the challenge was linking it up in a way that made it usable.”
For Stephen, the thread connecting journalism and government was not technology for its own sake, but usability. Information only matters if people can find it, understand it, and act on it.
A move that changed everything
Stephen describes the next phase of his career as “a bit of a left turn”. He moved overseas following his wife’s relocation with the UK Foreign Office, beginning a decade-long chapter living across Africa, including Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.
During this period, his work shifted decisively toward open data, anti-corruption, and transparency. In Rwanda, he helped develop the country’s first Freedom of Information website. He worked with Code for Africa, supporting newsrooms across the continent on data-driven journalism, including investigations linked to global collaborations like the Panama Papers.
“There was always this interest in anti-corruption and transparency in the background,” he says.
He then spent several years with the Open Knowledge Foundation, an organisation at the heart of the global open data movement. There, Stephen worked on initiatives ranging from clinical trial transparency to the Global Open Data Index, and notably Open Data for Tax Justice.
That project brought together civil society organisations to examine how poor data and opaque decision-making enable economic crime.
“We were pointing out how decisions were being made without the underlying data being published,” he explains. “So we made our own list.”
It was through this work that Stephen first encountered the emerging beneficial ownership movement and organisations like OpenCorporates and Open Ownership. A few years later, while based in Zimbabwe, he joined Open Ownership; a decision that would define the next phase of his career.
Building the foundations of global beneficial ownership data
At Open Ownership, Stephen eventually became Head of Technology, overseeing the organisation’s technical roadmap for nearly four years. His work included the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS), a suite of open-source tools, and the Open Ownership Register.
“What we were trying to do was help everyone with beneficial ownership transparency,” he says, “especially beneficial ownership data.”
BODS was designed as a common way for governments and others to structure, exchange, and connect ownership information about companies, trusts, and legal arrangements. Under Stephen’s leadership, the standard evolved through multiple versions, informed by years of practical experience with registries around the world.
At the same time, the Open Ownership Register put theory into practice. It republished beneficial ownership data from countries including the UK, Denmark, Slovakia, and Armenia, allowing users to search, visualise, and download ownership structures for free.
“You could go and look up any individual or company and see the ownership chain,” he explains. “In the UK, we found companies with more than 14 layers of ownership.”
The scale and complexity were eye-opening. Tens of thousands of companies had ownership structures with five or more layers, illustrating why unstructured documents and PDFs are not enough.
“If you want to share data across jurisdictions, you need a common way to understand it,” Stephen says. “Otherwise, every country becomes a new puzzle.”
Why BO registers succeed or fail
Working with governments across Africa, Europe, and beyond gave Stephen a clear view of what separates successful beneficial ownership reforms from those that struggle.
“Jurisdictions that plan the work properly tend to do it better,” he says. “They recognise the data will be useful to multiple parts of government, not just one agency.”
He is candid about the challenges. Political change, limited funding, and siloed government systems frequently slow progress. In some cases, beneficial ownership registers are treated as one-off compliance exercises, built quickly to avoid grey-listing, rather than as long-term infrastructure.
“If you collect all this information and nobody uses it,” he asks, “was it really worth collecting in the first place?”
Stephen emphasises that beneficial ownership is not just an anti-money laundering requirement. When used properly, it supports procurement integrity, tax enforcement, asset recovery, and internal government coordination.
“Some of the best conversations we had were with governments that simply needed to share data between their own agencies,” he says.
Understanding Beneficial Ownership: advising governments through change
Today, Stephen runs his consultancy, Understand Beneficial Ownership, based in Brussels. His work focuses on technical guidance, data standardisation, and helping governments navigate regulatory change.
“I help authorities that want to get to a point where they have data they can use and share,” he explains.
His work spans legislative advice, infrastructure design, data quality, and consulting about complex areas such as trusts, nominees, publicly listed companies, and state ownership. He is also deeply involved in tracking and advising on regulatory shifts, particularly in Europe as countries move toward data harmonization and legitimate-interest access regimes.
Stephen is also currently working with Kyckr, supporting UBO research and insight. Part of that work involves engaging directly with European registers to regain lawful access to beneficial ownership data as access rules evolve.
“I want people to be able to access data if they can,” he says. “If the data exists, it should be usable.”
Understand Beneficial Ownership helps governments make beneficial ownership data usable, structured, and interoperable.
Leading the change. A trusted voice in a complex space.
Throughout the conversation, one thing is clear: Stephen’s influence on the beneficial ownership space is not accidental. His ability to explain complexity in clear terms comes directly from his journalism roots and years spent translating between policymakers, technologists, and data users.
“Beneficial ownership data is often buried in documents, not data,” he says. “Even law enforcement often struggles to access it.”
That insight underpins much of his writing and commentary, which many in the registry and government community rely on to understand fast-moving policy and technical developments around Beneficial Ownership and Data Transparency.
Looking ahead, Stephen is cautiously optimistic. International bodies like the FATF, OECD, and World Bank continue to push for better data and interoperability, even as political will varies across jurisdictions.
“There is a huge amount of friction in the global system around understanding who owns what,” he says. “Reducing that friction just makes sense.”
For registries and governments navigating this complexity, Stephen Abbott -Pugh represents a rare combination: someone who understands data, policy, technology, and communication; and who can help turn beneficial ownership from a compliance burden into meaningful public infrastructure.
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