Vetting a company or charity before you fund it, take it on, or sign with it is real work, and work no one teaches you. The information is public and free. The difficulty is that it is scattered across a dozen places, and that being genuinely thorough takes hours nobody has. Probitas exists to close that gap.
The information is public and free. The work is in assembling it, cross-checking it, and being honest about the gaps.Why Probitas exists
01 / The problemAccess isn’t the issue. Assembly is.
Companies House publishes every filing within minutes. The Charity Commission lists trustees, accounts and regulatory cases. OFSI, OFAC and the UN publish their sanctions lists for free. The FCA shows which firms are authorised, which are not, and which are under enforcement.
None of this is hidden. The problem is not access, it is assembly. Nobody, not a grants team with forty decisions due on Friday, not a small foundation, not a compliance lead at a payments firm, has four hours per name to gather it all, cross-check it, and write up what they found.
The large screening databases solve a different problem. World-Check, Dow Jones and LexisNexis are built for banks running tens of thousands of names through an automated workflow. They cost what enterprise software costs, and they produce hit-lists, not reports. For a single, careful decision they are at once too much and too little.
02 / What we builtOne careful report. Built live. £3.99.
You give Probitas a UK company or charity number. It reads the same authoritative sources you would, Companies House, the Charity Commission, all three sanctions lists, the FCA register, court and tribunal records, audited accounts and press coverage, and writes you a careful, footnoted report. Twenty-plus pages, built live while you watch. £3.99.
Every claim carries a citation: where the fact came from, what was read, and when. If something cannot be cited, it does not appear. The verdict is in plain English, clear, conditional, decline or critical, and the report tells you both what it found and what it could not verify.
It is not regulated advice, and it does not pretend to be. It is the evidence layer underneath the person making the decision.
03 / Why this wayWe read and verify. We don’t generate.
The obvious thing to build today is a generative writing system behind a chat box, pointed at the same public sources, selling answers. The output is confident, plausible, and quietly wrong in the places no one checks until something breaks.
Probitas is built the other way around. It pulls the evidence first, filings, sanctions hits, audited accounts, and only then writes what the evidence supports. A verification stage refuses any sentence that cannot be traced back to a primary source, and cuts it before the report leaves the system.
That is slower than generating prose and hoping. We think the difference is the entire point.