Winding-up petitions sit on the public record an average of 76 days before the company is legally wound up — we measured 10,271 of them. Your press monitoring tells you when it's news. This tells you first.
A shared director is exposure, not wrongdoing — most closures are honest. Knowing which is which is the job.
Run a free investigation →Reputation teams already run press and social monitoring, and many run credit checks. Both matter — and both watch a layer where the damage is already public. Corporate distress, director disqualifications, and new incorporations appear first in the company register: filings, petitions, notices. For compulsory liquidations, the winding-up petition — a public document — precedes the company's legal death by an average of 76 days. That is the window in which a threat is knowable but not yet news.
Vet before they get close. A sponsor, an agency, a partner approaching your client: their register verdict — status, integrity checks, filings, the people behind them and those people's track records — in seconds, not days. You're the gate; most risks should never reach the client's desk.
Watch the client's own name. Every filing, appointment, resignation or change under their companies, the day it happens — plus name-variant matching that flags a new company registered using a name you protect.
Watch the company they keep. Your client can be clean and still be one boardroom away from a story: 1 in 13 active UK companies already shares a director with one that failed, went insolvent, or is run by a disqualified director. Network watch monitors one to two hops out and alerts you when something adverse enters the orbit — an insolvency, a ban, a suspicious new entrant.
When something fires, you don't get a hunch — you get a documented, cited brief: the register facts, the sources, the reasoning, exportable for the lawyer, the board, or the client. Signals are questions, not verdicts; every claim is tagged with its basis and its source.
76 days: mean gap between winding-up petition date and winding-up order date across 10,271 compulsory liquidations in Companies House insolvency records (median 52 days). Both dates from the same official case payloads.
1 in 13 (7.8%): active UK companies sharing at least one director with a company that is dissolved, has an insolvency event, or lists a disqualified director — computed across the full register population (5.6M active companies, 12.5M active directorships). This is a floor: only a fraction of historically dissolved companies are retained in any dataset. Exposure, not wrongdoing.
9,460: individuals with an active ban on today's disqualified-directors register (updated continuously).
Full methodology: companyintelligence.co.uk/methodology. Questions or corrections: [email protected].