A scraped list tells you what a website said on the day a crawler visited. A register tells you what a company legally declared. For sales, marketing and compliance, that difference decides whether your data survives an audit — and whether your outreach lands.
Provenance you can name
Register data carries a source you can point at: Companies House (UK), SIRENE (FR), CRO (IE), Registro Mercantil (ES), CVR (DK), Corporations Canada, ASIC (AU), MCA (IN). Each record has a registration number, a status and a filing history.
That provenance is what lets a legal or procurement team approve a data supplier. 'We scraped it' is not an answer to a data-protection question; 'this is the public register of company X' is.
Identity that does not drift
Company names change, trade names multiply, and websites disagree with each other. Registration numbers do not. Building your account model around the registered entity is the only way to keep hierarchies and dedupe stable over years.
It also fixes the classic reporting bug where one customer appears three times because marketing, sales and finance each spelled the name differently.
The trade-off to be honest about
Registers are authoritative but not complete: they rarely contain direct contact details, buying intent or tech stack. That is why serious datasets layer enrichment and public signals on top of a registry spine.
The failure mode is doing it in reverse — building on scraped data and hoping a registry lookup will clean it later. It will not; you cannot retro-fit provenance.
Frequently asked questions
Which registers does Drimble use?
Companies House, SIRENE/INSEE, the Irish CRO, Registro Mercantil, the Danish CVR, Corporations Canada and provincial registers, ASIC and the Indian MCA, alongside official property and land registries.
Is register-based B2B data GDPR compliant?
Public register data can be processed under legitimate interest, provided you document the source, honour objections and keep records current. Drimble publishes the source per dataset so you can evidence it.
