Why officer data needs a decision before collection
This register is public by statute, and that is often where the thinking stops. It should not.
Company records are corporate facts and carry no personal data question. Officer records are different: a name, a role, a nationality, an occupation, a month and year of birth and a correspondence address, describing a living person. The register publishes them under a legal regime designed for transparency about who controls companies. That is not the same thing as a general permission to compile them into profiles for any purpose.
In practice the client is the controller of whatever they build, and the obligations that follow - purpose, retention, the rights of the people in the dataset - are theirs. Our part is to make the personal data visible as such in the schema rather than letting it arrive as just more columns, and to raise the question at scoping rather than after delivery.
The second reason to think before collecting is scope. A great many briefs that ask for all officers actually need officers of a specific set of companies, and the narrower version is both cheaper and much easier to defend.
The third is that company-level fields - status, filings, accounts, addresses, SIC codes - cover most briefs, which means the conversation is usually about what a client should build rather than whether we can fetch it.