Business linkages: the growing priority for Baltic organizations amid rising geopolitical and compliance pressures

The scrutiny of business linkages has accelerated rapidly across Lithuania and the broader Baltic region, driven by increasing regulatory demands, evolving geopolitical risks, and growing expectations for corporate transparency. According to data from the open-data platform Okredo, three quarters of this year saw 56 percent more business linkage analyses than during the entire previous year. This surge reflects how both public and private sector organizations are revisiting how they assess partners, suppliers, beneficiaries, and ownership structures.

Today, nearly 60 percent of all analyses on the platform are conducted by public sector institutions, confirming that state entities are increasingly adopting data-driven tools to strengthen oversight and mitigate risk.

Demand for business linkage insights reaches new highs

Business linkage analysis encompasses a wide range of relational data: connections between companies, links to ultimate beneficial owners, ownership structures, historical business ties, and other critical background information. Over the past two years, demand for such evaluations has grown by around 30 percent annually, and compared to 2021, the total number of analyses performed has increased 1.5 times.

“Organizations today face a significantly more complex risk landscape,” says dr. Gerda Jurkoniene, CEO of Okredo. “From sanctions compliance and client due diligence to supplier assessment, fraud prevention, and internal controls – business linkage verification has become a natural part of daily operations. We see user numbers expanding rapidly, and organizations are clearly maturing in their approach to transparency and risk management.” 

While state registers such as JADIS and JANGIS ensure limited access to information about company participants and beneficial owners, regulatory constraints still limit their operational efficiency. “In practice, organizations need data that is real-time, user-friendly, and comprehensive. Our platform was built to meet that need,” notes Jurkoniene.

A tool for every sector – not just highly regulated industries

Okredo’s data demonstrates that business linkage intelligence is no longer relevant only for financial institutions or other highly regulated sectors. The private and public sectors alike increasingly deal with challenges such as “phoenix companies”, corporate farming structures, complex ownership structures, and new forms of sanctions evasion schemes.

Emerging issues – such as defining related companies, tracing the origins of funds, identifying cross-border ties, or detecting dormant but historically significant relationships – are pushing organizations to rely more heavily on business ownership and linkages data.

“Timely access to linkage insights helps prevent fraud and abuse, ensures more accurate allocation of public funds, supports better financing decisions, and increases overall accountability. As the Baltic region continues to expand its defense sector, we expect the demand for these tools to rise even further, because in these industries, detecting risk early is absolutely critical,” Jurkonienė emphasizes. 

57 million linkages – and growing daily

The Okredo platform currently provides access to nearly 57 million business linkages, more than 36 million of which are active. The database represents over 21 million unique entities, including more than 20 million individuals, demonstrating the scale of interconnectedness within the region’s economic ecosystem. 

What makes this resource particularly valuable is its geographic coverage: companies and individuals from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and the United Kingdom are included, enabling organizations to evaluate risk across borders and map international relationships with precision.

Integration into internal systems accelerates

An increasing number of organizations – especially financial institutions and companies with large customer bases – now integrate Okredo’s linkage analysis tools directly into their internal systems. As a result, the volume of checks performed automatically is growing at a pace similar to that observed on the platform itself.

This integration supports more efficient compliance with anti-money-laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist-financing (CTF) requirements, strengthens onboarding and client-knowledge procedures, and streamlines sanction checks. The insights are also instrumental in evaluating financing applications, verifying grant submissions, and preventing fraudulent schemes. 

Data-driven transparency becomes a Baltic standard

Okredo – operating for nearly a decade – now unites information from 25 data sources and serves almost 35,000 registered users. Its datasets and tools are increasingly embedded into the workflows of organizations seeking to future-proof their operations through data-driven governance.

As the region confronts heightened geopolitical risks, greater investment into defense, and rising expectations for corporate integrity, one trend is unmistakable: business linkage analysis is no longer a safeguard of tomorrow – it is a necessity of today.