Live UK director-change detection on Companies House: 4 real cases from this month

Most KYB pipelines I've seen treat the UK registry like a monthly snapshot. Aggregators such as OpenCorporates ingest the Companies House bulk feed once a day (or weekly, for some non-UK jurisdictions), build their own index, and resell. That's fine for company name search and stable fields. It breaks when a director leaves or a corporate restructuring triggers a PSC change, because the buyer of that snapshot is looking at last week's truth.

Here are four director changes that happened on Companies House over the past 30 days, with the actual filing-to-detection lag, queried live through an MCP server I run at openregistry.sophymarine.com/mcp.

Case 1: BP plc, director resignation, 5 days ago

On 6 May 2026, Thierry Dominique Gerard Garnier stepped down from the board of BP plc (Companies House number 00445790). The TM01 termination form was filed the next day, 7 May. Querying list_filings against the MCP server today (11 May) shows it as the most recent entry:

{
  "filing_date": "2026-05-07",
  "category": "officers",
  "description": "termination-director",
  "officer_name": "Thierry Dominique Gerard Garnier",
  "termination_date": "2026-05-06"
}

File-to-detect lag: zero. The data is the registry's response, returned in 80 ms. No nightly ingest. No snapshot cache.

Case 2: Unilever plc, three directors out on the same day

On 23 April 2026, three directors left the board of Unilever plc (00102498) on the same day: Karen Ann Richardson, Simon Peter Henry, and Melody Boone Meyer. Three separate TM01s were filed on 27 April, 4 days after the actual termination. Companies House had them by 27 April. Anyone querying live had access to all three within minutes of CH receiving the forms.

If you were holding a 30-day OpenCorporates snapshot from say 20 April, you would have shown those three as active directors of a FTSE 100 company for ~14 days after they had left. For a KYC desk approving counterparty risk on Unilever, that's a window where every report cites stale governance.

Case 3: Wise plc, capital change + new director appointment

Wise plc (13211214) had two events in March 2026:

• 2 March: Mr Scott Anthony Hill appointed director (AP01)
• 25 March: capital alteration / share redemption (SH02)

Filings dates were 12 March and 7 May respectively, so the appointment was visible within 10 days, and the capital change within 6 weeks. The gap between action date and filing date is the legal filing window, not the registry's delay. CH publishes within hours of receiving the form.

Case 4: Stripe Payments UK Ltd, corporate director change

Stripe Payments UK Ltd (08480771) had a corporate director change involving Stripe, Inc. on 3 January 2026, filed on 14 January. A natural-person appointment followed on 10 February (Ms Helen Claire McGrath), filed on 17 February. Both events were visible through live registry queries within a week, while many ingestion-based services were still serving December data.

How to run this yourself

The MCP server gives you 27 jurisdictions. For UK Companies House specifically, the relevant tool is list_filings with jurisdiction: "GB" and a company_id. The response carries everything Companies House returns: the TM01, AP01, SH01, SH02, CS01 form types, the officer or PSC names, the action date versus the filing date, and a document_id you can pass to fetch_document to retrieve the actual PDF.

Here's the discovery flow for Claude Desktop:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "openregistry": {
      "url": "https://openregistry.sophymarine.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Paste that into Claude Desktop's developer config, restart, and prompt: "What's the most recent director change at Unilever plc?" The agent calls search_companies, then list_filings, then summarizes. Free anonymous tier; no API key.

For non-Claude clients (Cursor, Cline, Goose, Zed, Gemini CLI), point them at the same URL. The transport is MCP Streamable HTTP with OAuth 2.1 discovery at the standard /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server.

Where this sits in the KYB stack

If you currently run a Companies House data pipeline through a static-snapshot vendor, here are the trade-offs of swapping in a live-query model:

• Freshness: every query goes to CH directly. Files appear when CH publishes, not on the vendor's ingest schedule.
• Cost: the free tier is 30 requests per minute. Pro is $9/month at 180 rpm; Max is $29/month at 900 rpm. Enterprise is custom.
• Coverage: 27 jurisdictions today including UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Cayman, Korea OpenDART, plus 17 others. The UK jurisdiction reference and the docs index describe what each registry exposes.
• Document access: fetch_document returns the upstream PDF or iXBRL bytes. The statutory record is the answer, not a parsed approximation.

A more detailed look at the UK API specifically, including post-ECCTA changes and what the API now returns versus what it withdrew, is in this earlier post on Companies House post-ECCTA reality.

For teams evaluating an OpenCorporates alternative that runs live against the source registries, the side-by-side comparison is at openregistry.sophymarine.com/vs/opencorporates. Same data sources, different freshness model.

What this doesn't replace

Live registry queries cover the registry. They don't cover sanctions lists, court records, beneficial-owner registries that require AML-gated access (the EU CJEU rulings on these are real), adverse-media screening, or proprietary subscription feeds. If your stack needs all of that bundled with one contract, you're still looking at Sayari, Kharon, or Castellum.AI.

For teams just looking for an OpenCorporates alternative that returns the registry's own response on every call, with the underlying document bytes available, the live MCP path covers it, and you can run it free.

If you've used live registry queries on other jurisdictions and seen edge cases where the public API doesn't cover something a commercial product does, I'd be interested. Comments below.