Moody's entity data: coverage, cost, and where resolution differs

What Moody's sells

Four assets, assembled by acquisition, sold into regulated compliance workflows.

• Orbis

  Bureau van Dijk's global database: 635 million companies blended from more than 170 sources, with financials, officers, beneficial owners and corporate family trees. 2

• The KYC API, formerly kompany

  Live lookups against commercial registers and financial authorities, covering 328 million companies with data retrieved exclusively from the primary source. 3

• GRID and Sanctions360

  Screening products in the same KYC line, covering adverse media, sanctions and politically exposed persons, sold alongside the entity data. 4

• Moody’s Maxsight

  The platform brand, launched in February 2025, sitting above the data products rather than replacing them. 11

• Maxsight orchestrates other vendors too

  Its published provider matrix runs checks through Creditsafe, LexisNexis, Equifax, Companies House, Refinitiv, Trulioo, Onfido and others. Orbis is one company-data provider among several. 12

• Built by acquisition

  Moody's bought Bureau van Dijk in August 2017, PassFort on 30 November 2021 and kompany on 28 February 2022, per its own SEC filing. 5

What it costs, and how you buy it

Moody's publishes no price for any of these products. Government contracts do.

• Nothing is published

  No price appears on the Orbis page, the KYC hub or the product pages. The Orbis page carries seven requests to book a demo and no trial, signup or pricing link. 2

• Federal contracts put Orbis at $220,000 to $4.0 million a year

  Published US federal awards, annualised from their own periods of performance. The floor is a small agency, the ceiling a large one. 6

• Two agencies, eight years apart, both near $4 million

  The IRS paid $4,012,338 for a single year of Orbis to September 2023. Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency licences run $8,058,000 across two years to January 2027. 6

• Those are exercised values, not ceilings

  Each figure is the base amount exercised divided by the contract period. Full option ceilings run far higher and are not annual prices. 6

• A free sandbox remains, for testing only

  The KYC API package page offers a sandbox plan for testing and routes every paid plan to the sales team. 7

• Self-serve pricing existed, and went away

  In 2022 kompany published per-call rates from about $0.023 with a credit-card checkout and no minimum term, capped at small companies. That page is now sales-led. 8

Where Moody's is genuinely the right answer

For a regulated buyer this is the strongest product in the category.

• Live primary-source retrieval at scale

  One of the largest networks of direct business registry connections, reaching commercial registers and financial authorities in more than 200 countries. 1

• They maintain those connections in public

  The developer portal publishes register connection status and ships release notes when a register changes. Brazil, Norway, Cyprus and Pennsylvania all changed in the six weeks to 19 August 2026. 3

• Documents, not just fields

  Register reports and filings retrieved from the primary source, with source attribution and retrieval timestamps on every record. When a compliance file must contain the document, this is the requirement. 1

• Ownership depth

  Over 2 billion ownership links, 1.8 billion historic links and 193 million active links in Orbis. For beneficial ownership across many countries this is very hard to match. 2

• Field-level source control

  You can rank sources and set fallback rules per field, so a record can prefer the register for legal name and a curated source for financials. We do not offer this. 1

• One vendor across entity and risk

  Entity data, ownership, adverse media, sanctions and politically exposed person screening under a single contract. We do not offer screening at all. 1

Where the shape of the product constrains you

Structural constraints rather than faults. Public user commentary on these products is scarce.

• Verification assumes you can already name the entity

  The documented input is a name, a registration number or another identifier. Deciding which of forty similarly named companies your customer meant happens before the call. 1

• Nothing published says how a match is scored

  No confidence value, ranked candidate list or similarity score appears in their public material. 1

• The API reference requires a login

  Their own help centre states that the kompany developer portal requires a login, so the request surface cannot be evaluated before you have an account. 9

• The answer is bounded by the register

  Live retrieval is only as rich as what a jurisdiction publishes. Where a register exposes little, the record is thin. 1

• Coverage depends which product you bought

  Orbis holds 635 million companies as a curated database. The live primary-source network reaches 328 million. They are not the same number and not the same product. 3

• Depth is not uniform across the record

  Their own brochure qualifies the financial plane as available "where available". A headline entity count says how many companies are listed, not how completely any one of them is filled in. 1

• Every paid route goes through sales

  No published price, no paid self-serve tier, and evaluation starts with a demo request. For a small team or an early integration that is a real barrier. 7

Side by side

Two different products rather than two versions of one. Rows where Moody's is stronger are marked.

Moody's capabilities and figures are drawn from its Entity Verification API brochure, its Orbis capability page, the kompany KYC API developer portal, its Maxsight help centre and its Form 10-K, all retrieved on 19 August 2026. Coverage figures are Moody's figures for its own products and differ between them. Contract costs are US federal award records, annualised by dividing the base amount exercised by the contract period of performance; full option ceilings are higher and are not annual prices. The 2022 per-call figure is converted from euros at the European Central Bank reference rate for 19 August 2026, 1 euro to $1.1605, and is no longer published. Packaging is configurable per contract, so a given deployment may differ. No precision or recall benchmark is published for either service, and we have not run a head-to-head test between them.

How the Entity Verification API works

What the call takes, and what comes back, from Moody's own material.

• You configure a source waterfall first

  An ordered sequence of data sources, with preferences and fallback rules set at both the entity and the field level. 1

• Then you submit a lookup key

  Their words: a company name, a registration number, or another identifier. There is no documented field for what a company does. 1

• Two search endpoints, both keyed on a name

  Their developer notes reference an indexSearch by name against the held index and a liveSearch by name against the register itself. 10

• It reads live registers and curated data together

  Official registers across 200+ countries, curated entity data, and enrichment sources, selected according to your configuration. 1

• Output carries attribution and timestamps

  A structured record with source attribution and registry retrieval timestamps, plus supporting documentation. 1

• No match score is documented

  Their published material describes no confidence value, candidate list or similarity score. The full API reference sits behind a login, so this is what is published, not proof of what exists. 9

Which one to choose

Common questions

Is Moody's entity data real-time?

Yes. The Entity Verification API reads live from commercial registers and financial authorities across more than 200 countries and jurisdictions, and returns the record with source attribution and a registry retrieval timestamp. Moody's describes it as one of the largest networks of direct business registry connections, and its developer portal publishes release notes when an individual register changes.

How many companies does Moody's cover?

It depends which product. Orbis, the curated database, holds more than 635 million companies blended from over 170 sources. The Entity Verification brochure cites 625 million companies of curated data. The KYC API, which reads live from registers, covers more than 328 million companies. These are different products and the numbers are not interchangeable.

How much does Moody's Orbis cost?

Moody's publishes no price. Published US federal contracts give the real range: the Government Accountability Office paid $220,000 for a year of Orbis data, while the IRS paid $4,012,338 for a single year and Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency licences run $8,058,000 across two years to January 2027. Those are annualised from the contracts' own periods of performance.

Can I sign up for Moody's entity API myself?

Not for a paid plan. The KYC API package page offers a sandbox plan for testing and routes every paid plan to the sales team, and the Orbis page offers only a demo request. In 2022 kompany did publish self-serve per-call pricing with a credit-card checkout, capped at companies under 5 million euros in revenue, but that page is now sales-led.

What is kompany now called?

kompany, formally 360kompany AG of Vienna, was acquired by Moody's on 28 February 2022 and its capability is now sold as Moody's Entity Verification, with the developer-facing product still branded KYC API. Moody's Maxsight is the current platform brand, carrying the onboarding workflow layer that came from the PassFort acquisition in November 2021.

What is the difference between entity verification and entity resolution?

Verification confirms that a known entity exists and reports what the register says about it. Resolution works out which entity an ambiguous input refers to before anything can be verified. If your input is a clean legal name or a registration number, you need verification. If it is a trading name typed into a form, you need resolution first.

Does Moody's return a match confidence score?

Nothing in their public material documents one. The brochure describes submitting a name, a registration number or another identifier and receiving a structured record, with no confidence value, ranked candidate list or similarity score. Their full API reference sits behind a login, so this is what is published rather than proof of what exists.

How accurate is Moody's matching?

No precision or recall benchmark is published for it, and we have not run a head-to-head test against it. What is checkable is the published request surface: the call takes a name or an identifier, so how well it performs depends on how precisely you can already name the entity.