Individuals vs legal entities
What changes between a natural person and a legal entity — the data you capture, the KYC they complete, and who actually signs.
Overview
Every shareholder is one of two things: a natural person or a legal entity — an individual, or a company.
They sit in the same list and hold shares in exactly the same way. What differs is the information you capture, the KYC they complete, and who signs on their behalf. You choose the type at creation, and several later journeys follow from that choice.
What you'll learn
The two shareholder types and what each carries
The contact-person subtlety, which is the point most often missed
The two different KYC journeys
Why a ManCo holding shares in the BidCo is nothing special
What changes
The information you capture. For an individual: their identity information — name, date and place of birth, nationality, address. For a legal entity: the company's legal identity — legal name, registration number or SIREN, legal form, registration city, registered office address, share capital — plus its legal representative.
The KYC they complete. Two genuinely different journeys:
What it involves | |
|---|---|
Individual | Identity document, personal details, proof of address. |
Legal entity | Registration document, company details, the legal representative's type, their personal details and identity document, and optionally the register of beneficial owners. |
Who signs. An entity cannot sign. A legal-entity shareholder signs through its legal representative — which is why signature setup asks for the individual holding the authority rather than the entity itself.
The contact person
This is the subtlety worth naming, and it is stated in one line in one dialog.
The contact is the authorised individual empowered to act on behalf of the shareholder.
For an individual, that person is themselves. For a legal entity, it is a different person — its legal representative.
So a legal-entity shareholder always involves two parties: the entity that holds the shares, and the human who acts for it. That distinction has consequences in KYC, in signature setup, and in who receives every email about that shareholder.
What does not change
They are both shareholders, in one list. The project's shareholder list holds individuals and entities together, and both hold positions in companies the same way. There is no separate register for entities.
Both can be invited to the platform. A legal-entity shareholder's representative gets an account and a task list, just as an individual would.
Practical guidance
Get the type right at creation. Everything downstream follows from it — the fields, the KYC flow, the signer.
For an entity, know who acts for it before you start. You will need their name, email and phone, not just the company's details.
A ManCo holding shares in the BidCo is a legal-entity shareholder. New teams sometimes model this as something special. It is not — same record, same list.
Related
A4.2 — Adding a shareholder · doing it, for either type
A7.1 — What a KYC check covers · the two journeys in detail
A8.7 — Subscription process: defining signers · why an entity signs through a person
B1.9 / B1.10 — KYC for a legal entity · what the representative actually completes, in two parts: the company, then themselves
