You've enrolled with AUSTRAC. Your program is built. Then a Pty Ltd walks in as a new client, and the rule you've read a dozen times finally has to become an action: identify the beneficial owners.
So you do the obvious thing. You look the company up on the free ASIC register, or on ABN Lookup, and you hit a wall. It tells you the company exists, its ACN, that it's registered, roughly where. It does not tell you who owns it. The one fact you actually need for CDD is the one the free tools don't give you.
Here's where the ownership data really lives, and how to read it.
First, what you're looking for
A beneficial owner is a real person who ultimately owns 25% or more of your client, or who controls it. Ownership can run through other companies, so you follow the chain until you reach a human. Control counts even at zero percent. We wrote the full concept up in beneficial ownership: how to identify and verify UBOs. This post is the practical half: where the numbers come from.
For an Australian company, they come from one place, and it isn't the free search.
The free lookup that looks right but isn't
Search a company on ASIC Connect and you can view a free "Company Summary". It's tidy and official looking, so people screenshot it and file it. It carries the company name, ACN, ABN, registration date, status, and the suburb of the registered office.
It does not carry a single director. It does not carry a single shareholder. For working out who owns 25% of the company, it's useless, and it's the single most common wrong file we see people save. ABN Lookup is the same story: entity type and status, no people.
The ownership data sits behind a paid product.
The one product to buy
On the company's ASIC Connect page, under "Information for purchase", buy Current company information. It's about $10, paid by card, and you don't need an ASIC account to get it. It arrives by email as a PDF within minutes, not business days.
Ignore the rest of that menu. The free Company Summary has no people, as above. "Current and historical" adds every past change you don't need for onboarding. Roles and relationships, certificates, satisfied charges: all real products, none of them the thing. One line item, ten dollars, done.
One more habit worth keeping: before you pay, run the ACN through ABN Lookup and check the current name. Company names get reused and recycled, and it is genuinely easy to buy an extract for a business that shares a name with the one you meant. Ten dollars and five minutes of confusion, avoided.
Reading the extract
The Current company information extract has three parts that matter for beneficial ownership.
Officeholders. The directors and the secretary. A director who actually runs the company is a beneficial owner through control, even holding no shares at all, so directors are always on your list to consider. The extract gives you each person's name, date of birth, and appointment date. Since 2 February 2026 it no longer prints their home address, which changes nothing about identifying them.
Share structure. The classes of shares and how many are issued. This is your denominator.
Members. The shareholders, each with the number of shares they hold and, crucially, a "beneficially held" flag. Divide a member's holding by total shares issued and you have their percentage. Anyone at 25% or more is a beneficial owner. Simple arithmetic, but it's arithmetic you have to actually do, because the extract hands you the numbers, not the conclusion.
Watch the beneficially held flag. If it says No, those shares are held for somebody else, a nominee arrangement, and the person you have to identify is whoever they're held for. The extract won't name them. That's your cue to ask the client a direct question, not to file the nominee as the owner.
Where the extract stops and you start
The extract is a strong start, not the finish. Three places it hands the work back to you.
Layers. If a shareholder is itself a company, you're not done. You pull that company's extract too and keep following the chain until you reach the individuals at the top. A structure two or three companies deep is common and completely legitimate, and it's exactly where a lazy check misses the real owner.
Listed public companies. A company listed on the ASX has no members register in its extract, because its shares are held through a share registry, not ASIC. Different animal, different path. Most Tranche 2 clients are private companies where the register is right there, but know the difference when you meet one.
Trusts. If your client is a trust, there is no ASIC extract for the trust, because a trust isn't registered with ASIC. Its corporate trustee has one, and you'll want it, but trust ownership lives in the trust deed, not on any register. That's a separate exercise we covered in CDD on a family trust.
The step people skip
Finding out who the owners are is not the same as verifying them. The extract identifies names. It doesn't prove those people are who they say they are, and it doesn't screen them. Once you have the list, each individual still needs their identity verified and a check against PEP and sanctions lists. Identification and verification are two obligations, and an ASIC extract only does the first one.
That's the honest shape of it. Ten dollars and a PDF gets you a defensible answer to "who owns this company", which is more than the free tools will ever give you, and a lot less than the whole job.
AML Mate reads the extract for you: upload the PDF and it pulls out the directors and shareholders, works the percentages, and flags nominee holdings, so the maths and the transcription aren't yours to get wrong. You review and confirm before anything is saved. If you want to see where beneficial owners fit in the wider onboarding flow, the free compliance check walks your obligations first.
This article is general information, not legal or compliance advice. Your obligations depend on your business and the services you provide. For advice specific to your circumstances, consult a qualified AML/CTF professional.