Project Overview

EU Directives are shaping the company landscape in the EU. The emerging "EU Company Law" provides added flexibility and new options to the entrepreneur whilst guaranteeing the protection of the economic actors that deal with companies.

In domains other than Company Law, but connected to it, EU legislation is being set up to facilitate business and reduce business risks. Priorities for the EU are: to prevent financial crime, to combat money laundering, to ensure transparency of the financial market, whilst facilitating the free movement of companies and services. 
The Business Registers (BRs) are the first, necessary points of contact that companies have with the public administrations. As such, the BRs are obviously instrumental in implementing EU Company Law. The BRs, in an enlarged EU where companies will move freely, need to interact across borders, to exchange company-registration information and to do so despite possible administrative, technical, cultural and language barriers. To be effective, each BR needs to be able to interact with all other European BRs, and to interpret company-registration information coming from all the other countries. Eventually, all BRs need to integrate their operational processes and systems so as to perform efficiently.

BRITE addresses cross-border BR interoperability at all levels: organisational, technical, and semantic. It also addresses interoperability across "domains", i.e. interoperability between the BRs and the public agencies that operate in the selected sub-domains of e-Government.

At the trans-national level, the European BRs have been collaborating since the early nineties, having established the European Business Register, a network that allows the public to securely access through the Internet the company data stored in the participating BRs, using a multi-language user interface. There is as yet, however, no ICT instrument capable of managing effectively the duality of trans-national laws and national laws that interplay in the implementation of European legislation and other cross-border initiatives. Nor is there an instrument capable of efficiently accommodating the broad spectrum of cross-border services, across a number of domains, in which the Business Registers of Europe could make a critical contribution an instrument that is highly customizable yet flexible and extensible; an instrument that includes mechanisms for creating, designing, and implementing high-value eGovernment scenarios enabled by the Business Registers of Europe.
BRITE has set out to create that instrument. 

Read more about BRITE's scientific and technical objectives.