Ownership lens

The ownership lens traces corporate ownership above the companies in your workspace and combines every ownership path it finds, so you can see who ultimately owns and controls your suppliers — not just the company that owns them directly. A single, directly recorded ownership relationship is usually easy to read on its own. The harder question is aggregate ownership: once you follow ownership upward through layers of parent companies, holding companies, and beneficial owners and add every path together, how much of a supplier is ultimately owned or controlled by a particular company, government, or individual? This lens answers that across your supplier base at once.

Availability varies by tenant and license entitlement. Please reach out to your Altana account manager to learn more.

When to use the ownership lens

• When a compliance analyst needs to know whether a supplier that looks independent is, in aggregate, majority-owned by a party of interest.
• When you need to model an ownership-based regulatory test — the BIS 50% Rule, Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) provisions — across your whole supplier base rather than one company at a time.
• When your own risk policy sets an ownership threshold that differs from the formal regulatory line, and you want to test exposure at your level rather than someone else's.
• When the supplier base runs to tens of thousands of entities and tracing ownership by hand isn't realistic.

Before you start

• You need a workspace containing the companies you want to assess. See Anatomy of a Workspace for how a workspace is built and how lenses apply to its tabs.
• Ownership relationships are derived from licensed corporate ownership data combined with Altana's entity and risk data. Your Altana account manager can confirm which firmographic information your organization is entitled to.

How it works

1. Choose the starting point. Analysis begins from a set of entities you define — a named risk list, or a country of registration. Because you control the starting point, the same lens answers questions as different as "which of my suppliers are ultimately controlled by entities on a given watchlist?" and "which of my suppliers are ultimately owned or controlled by entities registered in a particular country?"
2. Set the ownership threshold. You choose the aggregate-ownership level that puts an entity in scope — 25%, 40%, 50%, or whatever your program requires. Many teams deliberately set the threshold below the formal regulatory line to capture entities that are close enough to warrant a closer look.
3. Review what the lens surfaces. Altana surfaces the ownership chains as filtered by the criteria you set, with the aggregate ownership figure that put each entity in scope.
4. Re-test at a different threshold. Because the threshold is yours to set, you can move it and compare — a sensitivity test across risk tolerances rather than a single fixed cutoff.

How ownership is traced

The lens assembles the ownership picture from several kinds of ownership relationship, which together give both breadth and depth. An entity can be flagged whether the relevant control shows up as a stated chain of owning companies, an aggregate indirect stake, a declared ultimate owner, or an individual beneficial owner.

• Direct ownership chains — stated, layer-by-layer ownership, followed from a supplier up through its owners, and their owners, in turn. Each step carries its ownership percentage, which is what makes it possible to calculate how much a company at the top holds at the bottom.
• Indirect ownership — relationships known to exist, and known in total, even where the source data doesn't spell out every intermediate step. These are captured as indirect links so the stake isn't lost.
• Ultimate owners — the topmost controlling entity in a corporate hierarchy, as the Global Ultimate Owner (GUO) or Domestic Ultimate Owner (DUO). These answer "who is ultimately behind this company?" without walking every intermediate step.
• Beneficial owners — the natural person or people who ultimately control an entity, including their country association. Surfacing individuals behind corporate structures depends on your organization being licensed for beneficial owner data.

How aggregate ownership is calculated

Two rules describe how the figures combine:

• Down a chain, percentages multiply. If A owns 50% of B and B owns 40% of C, A's ownership of C along that chain is 50% × 40% = 20%.
• Across chains, percentages add. When the same controlling entity reaches a supplier through more than one chain, those contributions are summed into a total aggregate figure.

A supplier can be owned by several entities in your starting set at once, so the lens reports two different figures and you can test your threshold against either:

• Total ownership — the combined stake reaching a supplier from your starting set, with every contributing owner added together. This is the figure you compare against your aggregate ownership threshold. Use it when the test asks whether parties of concern collectively own or control a company, as the BIS 50% Rule does.
• Single company ownership — the largest stake held by any one entity in your starting set, on its own. Use this when the test turns on a single owner reaching the threshold by itself.

The two can diverge sharply, which is why the distinction matters: three listed entities holding 20% each give a supplier 60% total ownership but only 20% single company ownership. At a 50% threshold, that supplier is in scope on the first measure and out of scope on the second.

Example scenarios you can model

These illustrate how teams configure the lens. Read them as configurations, not as compliance conclusions — see What this lens is, and what it isn't.

Modeling the BIS 50% Rule

The BIS 50% Rule can subject a company to export restrictions when it is owned 50% or more, directly or indirectly, by one or more listed entities — even when the company itself isn't named. To model it, set the starting point to the Military End User Lists and the threshold to 50% aggregate ownership. The lens surfaces the downstream companies that meet that combined-ownership test.

Modeling Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) exposure

FEOC rules distinguish a Specified Foreign Entity (SFE) from a Foreign-Influenced Entity (FIE), each with its own starting points and thresholds. In the lens you can designate the SFE starting set using country of registration, watchlist membership, and beneficial-owner country signals, then propagate ownership to flag entities where a single SFE holds ownership above the SFE threshold, or where several SFEs together hold ownership above the aggregate threshold.

This covers the ownership-based elements of a FEOC assessment. Some FEOC criteria are not ownership-based at all — certain debt-holding and contractual "effective control" tests, for example — and an ownership analysis cannot establish them. For how FEOC sits alongside other ownership-driven regimes, see Ownership-Based Exposure.

Keeping your analysis current

Ownership structures change, and so do the underlying data and the watchlists you start from. When a re-calculation moves an entity across your threshold, the lens can flag it as requiring re-review, so you don't have to re-run everything on a schedule to find what moved. That matters most at scale, where a supplier base can run into the tens of thousands of entities.

What this lens is, and what it isn't

It is an analytical tool for tracing and combining corporate ownership so you can identify and prioritize exposure.

It is not a legal or regulatory compliance determination. The thresholds, the starting points, and the interpretation are yours to set, and results should be validated through your own compliance and legal review.

Key terms

• Aggregate ownership — the combined ownership one entity holds in another once every path between them is traced and summed.
• Ownership threshold — the aggregate-ownership level at which you consider an entity in scope.
• Total ownership and single company ownership — the combined stake held by every entity in your starting set, versus the largest stake held by any one of them.
• Specified Foreign Entity (SFE) and Foreign-Influenced Entity (FIE) — the two categories FEOC-related regulation distinguishes, each with its own starting points and thresholds.

Direct ownership, indirect ownership, ultimate owners, and beneficial ownership are defined in Companies, Facilities & Ownership and indexed in the Glossary.

Related concepts

• Ownership-Based Exposure — how ownership-driven exposure works, and the regimes that rely on it.
• Companies, Facilities & Ownership — canonical companies, ownership chains, GUO/DUO/UBO, and threshold mechanics.
• Reading the Exposure Lens — the charting and filtering behavior lenses share.
• Working with Tabs & Lenses — how lenses are applied to a workspace tab.