Inform Direct celebrates progress ahead of Accountex

Cosec compliance in May 2026

It has certainly been an eventful 12 months for company secretarial compliance. A year ago, we were all still awaiting much of the detail from Companies House regarding the logistics of individual verification – particularly the process of notification for existing directors and PSCs – and the whole concept was new to many accountants I spoke with at Accountex in May 2025.

A year on, we’re all more than familiar with some of the challenges of the new regime, and we continue to work with Companies House where we (and, evidently, you) feel that the Registrar can provide clearer, more consistent and predictable outcomes for customers.

I’ve been open about my own views about quite how complex the ‘new’ requirements have become, especially in the regime of when personal codes must be provided to Companies House for existing appointments. Because of that complexity, it’s hardly surprising that compliance rates for confirmation statements (where they require personal codes for directors) are down and many PSCs are overdue in submitting a VS01 verification statement.

All the work by accountants from 18 November 2025 in verifying the identity of their clients and reporting to Companies House has revealed quite how poor the quality of data on the public record had become. While examples such as ‘Mickey Mouse’ as a director of a company hit the headlines, those cases were comparatively few in number. What is far more common is for names to be inconsistent, and for dates of birth to be incorrect. We’ve updated our technical guide on how to correct dates of birth on the public record, as Companies House have further amended the process here.

It has been great to welcome so many new accountants to Inform Direct in the last year, enabling practices large and small to take advantage of our cohesive solution to ECCTA, with:

• Integrated functionality for ACSPs to verify with identity of directors and PSCs;
• Fully automated confirmation statements, including the filing of Companies House personal codes
• Automated, timely submission of VS01 verification statements for PSCs
• Intuitive reports and dashboards for easy oversight of identity verification compliance

There are now more than 650,000 companies managed on the Inform Direct platform, with over 5,000 accounting practices and other organisations mastering company secretarial compliance using our software. Thank you all for putting your trust in us, including to all those who provided such very kind feedback in our recent product survey. It was a delight to read your comments.

But we’re always looking to do better…

Fantastic customer support, always

Exceptional customer service is always at the heart of Inform Direct and we continue to invest in delivering an amazing experience.

In the last year, we’ve welcomed Nick and Lauren to the Customer Support Team, and they’re doing an amazing job – alongside Alex, Jamie, James and Luke – in helping accountants get the best out of Inform Direct and making your company secretarial work as easy as possible.

We’re also upgrading the platform we use to manage our support efforts. That’s also enabling us to offer more to our users, with an AI-assisted chat feature shortly available 24/7. Thoroughly tested and built on Inform Direct’s expert knowledge base, the AI-assisted chat will answer an enormous range of queries, but rest assured: you’ll still always have access to our team when you need it.

Ongoing product development

Providing the best solution for ECCTA compliance has been our priority over the last year, and we were glad to have everything ready ahead of 18 November 2025 – even if Companies House had some catching up to do!

We’ve also invested in our platform infrastructure, so Inform Direct now runs fully on Microsoft Azure. That enables us to ensure our software remains secure, scalable and performant, both now and in the future. You may also have noticed performance improvements where we’ve found areas to optimise, and we’ll continue to do more to deliver you the best experience.

In the coming months, we’re looking at a range of further enhancements:

• Continued improvements to our two-way integration with Companies House, ensuring Inform Direct is always up to date with any changes made directly by clients
• Integration with other Bright products to facilitate a more integrated experience
• AI-assisted product features, but only where they will deliver genuine benefit to you
• Various small items, to processes and templates, requested by users

We also expect Companies House to pursue further phases of implementation of ECCTA in the next 12 months. You can always be confident that we’ll provide both information and appropriate solutions when you need them, enabling you and your clients to be on top of compliance.

We’d love your feedback

Our best ideas have always come from our wonderful customers, both new and long standing. We’d be so happy to hear your suggestions, whether for big new features or the tiniest of changes that will help you and your business. Please do get in touch with any feedback you have!

We’d also like to explore how we can support company secretarial knowledge in your practice, enabling you and your team to have the knowledge you need – and be able to demonstrate that to your customers. Many of you already use our blog as an on demand resource, but we’d appreciate your thoughts in our survey on how we can better support you in this area.

A big thank you

On behalf of the whole Inform Direct team, I’d like to thank all of our amazing customers for your continued support and enthusiasm. You inspire us always to do better, always to go the extra mile, always to find new ways to delight, because that’s exactly what you do for your own clients.

See you at Accountex!