Anyone who has tried to verify an Australian business programmatically knows the pain. There isn't one government source you can call - there are at least half a dozen, each with its own format, its own quirks, and in most cases, no API at all.
Three registries, three different problems
The Australian Business Register (ABR) exposes ABN and GST status through a SOAP/XML web service - usable, but dated, and awkward to integrate into a modern REST stack. ASIC, which holds the actual company registrations, doesn't offer an API at all; it publishes a weekly CSV dump of several million rows. ACNC, the charities regulator, is the same story: no API, just a periodic file export. If your product needs sanctions or AML screening on top of that, you're now also pulling from DFAT's consolidated list and ASIC's banned and disqualified registers separately.
For a compliance, onboarding, or billing workflow that just wants to answer "is this a real, active Australian business, and should I be worried about it," that means building and maintaining several ingestion pipelines before you've written a single line of your actual product.
What AUO does differently
