We’re thrilled to introduce our brand-new identity verification functionality, purpose-built to help you meet the upcoming Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act (ECCTA) requirements — while also giving you complete visibility over where each officer and PSC are in their journey to obtain a Companies House personal code.
Key date: 18 November 2025
From this date, a company’s next confirmation statement will need to include personal codes for relevant individuals. This product update is here to make sure you’re prepared, compliant, and confident.
Who can use this?
These features are available exclusively to subscribers that have registered as an Authorised Corporate Service Provider (ACSP) through Companies House and who have entered their ACSP authorised agent details into Inform Direct.
A better way to manage company secretarial work
Inform Direct is the perfect tool to help make company secretarial work a whole lot easier:
> Manage details of officers, PSCs and shares
> ACSPs can use integrated identity verification
> Options to automate confirmation statements
> Easy filing of forms with Companies House
> Create documents from 400+ templates
Why this matters
Ahead of 18 November 2026, a year after the new regime comes into force, every applicable person involved in a company will need to have:
- Completed an identity check (or had a check performed on them by an ACSP)
- Obtained a Companies House personal code
- Submitted the personal code for each of their relevant roles on any company to Companies House
The exact timescales for each individual and company are being defined by Companies House, but we’d encourage everyone to take the necessary steps to obtain personal codes for yourself and your clients.
That’s a big operational shift — and we’ve designed our system to keep it simple, visual, and trackable with clear on-screen icons and real-time reporting inside Inform Direct.
How it works — The 4-step process
Step 1: Choose your client
From the officer, PSC, or LLP member list, click the pencil icon next to the individual you need to check.
Step 2: Review key details and select the type of identity check
Confirm the individual’s:
- First name
- Last name
- Date of birth
- Residential address (if an address check is selected)
Then choose the type of check — Identity or Address. Not sure? Our blog can help you decide which to choose.
Additional validation is in place to identify checks for an individual on different companies that have already been sent to an email address to stop more checks being sent than necessary.
**This review step is crucial for a smooth verification process. Please ensure the details of the individual are correct, making updates where appropriate, before progressing.**
Step 3: Send the verification request to the officer/PSC
- Send the identification check request.
- The individual will then receive a secure link to our BrightChecks verification journey, powered by Credas.
- They complete the process themselves — no back-and-forth paperwork needed.
Step 4: Complete and obtain a Companies House personal code
- Get instant dashboard alerts and emails when the check passes or fails.
- Download the details of the check carried out in a PDF for your records.
- Once approved, head to the Companies House ACSP portal to log the identity verification with Companies House so that they can issue the individual with a personal code.
Stay in control with comprehensive reporting
Our Identity Checking Report gives you an at-a-glance view of every check you’ve run, helping you track progress and stay ahead of deadlines.
Please let us know your feedback
Please do let us know about any other enhancements or feature recommendations that would improve Inform Direct for you, especially if related to identity checking and other upcoming ECCT Act requirements.
Our commitment to improving Inform Direct can be seen on our timeline of updates, past, present and future.
Inform Direct makes it quick and easy to maintain company registers, manage company records and submit filings to Companies House at the touch of a button.