The Council adopted a directive aimed a creating a system for the interconnection of central, commercial and companies registers and at improving access to up-to-date and trustworthy information on companies. The new rules are a response to the increasing demand for access to information on companies in a cross-border context.

Ministers at the Education/Youth/Culture/Sport Council meeting adopted a directive following an agreement with the European Parliament at first reading and after the Commission's proposal presented in February 2012, aimed at setting up a system for the interconnection of central, commercial and companies registers. All Member States engage, under the new rules, in enabling electronic communication between registers and transmitting information to individual users in a standardised way, by means of identical content and interoperable technologies, throughout the Union.

The new directive establishes that the interoperability of registers should be ensured through the Member States' delivery of information from their registers, by providing services which will constitute interfaces to a European central platform. This platform will be a centralised set of information technology tools and services, used by all domestic registers. The European e-Justice Portal will serve as one of the electronic access points.

Today, a voluntary cooperation mechanism between the business registers already exists in Europe but it is limited to certain types of information and does not cover every Member State. Under the new directive, companies and their branches in other member states will have a unique identifier that allows them to be unequivocally identified.