Are you a corporate lawyer or M&A professional? Have you ever run an ASIC Company Search? This might be of interest.
The Government has scrapped the $500m Modernising Business Registers program (MBR).
Here’s everything you need to know 👀
What is the MBR? 📜
A $500m program set up in 2019 to improve the registers that corporate professionals use every day (think company searching, ABN Lookup or Authorised Reps of AFSL holders – full list in picture).
You might have heard about it because the plan was to make company searching free.
What did the MBR actually deliver? 🚚
✅ Phase 1: Director ID was launched earlier this year
❌ Phase 2: Company Information was cancelled part-way through
❌ Phases 3-5: Plans for Business Names (for non-company entities) Professional and Historical Registers is cancelled.
Moving forward, they literally said “there would be minimal improvement in the experience of users interacting with registers”. Other plans include integrating Director ID into the existing registers and improving user auth/login.
Why was the MBR cancelled? 😵
Time and costs blew out. After independent review, it was estimated to take another 5 years and another $2.3bn to complete (a total 5x of initial cost). Yikes.
How does this affect lawyers? 👩🏻⚖️
It's unclear whether free searching of the company register will happen (my fingers are still crossed 🤞) – but it seems unlikely.
Searching for director’s involvements in other companies (for tasks like due diligence) might get easier with integrated Director ID because each director will have a searchable ID. But so far, there’s only about 2.3m directors signed up, and it might take a while for them to integrate it.
Not much else will change from a user experience – your search results are still going to come back as PDFs – sad!
Why did I read the report? 🔮
DDLoop helps M&A professionals automate legal due diligence workflows that use government register data.
Our modern platform pulls together ASIC company information, PPSR, insolvency and IP searching onto one platform (with more on the way). We are making it easy to search, profile and analyse a company (or corporate group) and its officeholders when doing legal due diligence as a part of an M&A transaction, financing deal or investment decision.
