What is a director details check?
A director details check looks up the information held against an individual director on a trusted corporate data source, including the companies that person is linked to. It reads the corporate register from the person's side.
The key is the director identification number, or DIN. It is allotted to one individual and stays with them as they join and leave boards.
How the Director Details API maps one person's directorships
The API returns the available information held against the identifier in a single structured response, including the linked companies. The wider picture arrives inside your workflow instead of in a browser tab.
Credit, risk and onboarding teams rarely ask who a director is. They ask what else the person is attached to. Answering that by hand means one lookup, then several more.
Why the lookup starts from a DIN
The request starts from the individual's director identifier. Personal names make a poor key. They repeat, they are transliterated inconsistently, and they change with marriage and with spelling convention.
The identifier also keeps the trail honest in the other direction. A DIN is allotted once and never reissued. Two directorships carrying the same number belong to the same person, and two carrying different numbers do not, whatever the names look like.
What Basic and Advanced hold against a DIN
Two levels are available. Basic answers the link question directly: the core information held against the identifier, and the companies it is linked to.
Advanced goes further into each link. Where the record holds them, you get the capacity a person is recorded in at a given company. You also get the dates around that link, and whether it reads as current or ended.
What is present differs from one identifier to the next and depends on the data source. The selected service contract decides which level you can call.
| Information | Basic | Advanced |
|---|---|---|
| Core information held against the identifier | Yes | Yes |
| Companies the identifier is linked to | Yes | Yes |
| Capacity recorded at each company | No | Where recorded |
| Dates around each link | No | Where recorded |
| Whether a link reads as current | No | Where recorded |
Where the person-first view earns its place
This check belongs to enhanced due diligence. Credit and risk teams at lenders and NBFCs reach for it when related-party exposure to a promoter or guarantor has to be signed off.
Fintech and payment platforms use it for control-person screening. Insurers use it when commercial and liability risk is being assessed, and real estate teams use it before money goes into a project company. Marketplaces and staffing platforms use it to spot a repeat operator who has stood a fresh entity up behind a closed one.
How to read an association list fairly
Treat a link as a fact about a filing, and nothing more. It does not show that a person did anything wrong, and matching on a name alone will eventually attach the wrong individual to a company.
Age matters too. A link that ended years ago can still sit in a historical record, and a dormant company says less about a person than a live one does. Read the links with their dates attached.
Where a DIN lookup belongs in your review process
Store the structured response instead of a screenshot, keep the reason for the check beside it, and re-check as often as your policy says.
Many teams call the service only after a company-level check has raised something worth pursuing. That keeps the personal information they hold in proportion to the decision in front of them.
Consent, purpose and handling for a DIN lookup
This service returns information about an identified individual. Run it only for a legitimate business purpose connected to a relationship you hold or are entering into. Stay within the authorized use your service contract describes, and give the notice and consent your privacy policy and applicable law require.
Keep access to the response narrow, delete it on the schedule your retention policy sets, and log the reason for each lookup. What the register holds depends on the data source and the record. What you do with it afterwards is your decision, not the service's.