Companies House identity verification for Egyptian residents: the director and PSC playbook.

Yes. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 gave Companies House new powers to confirm who is actually behind a UK company, rather than simply recording whatever name a filer typed into a form. Companies House began phasing this in from 18 November 2025, with identity verification now a live legal requirement for company directors and people with significant control, rolled out over roughly 12 months for the existing register.

The requirement makes no distinction by nationality, passport-issuing country or place of residence. A resident of Cairo who is a director of an English or Welsh company must verify their identity in exactly the same way as a director resident in Leeds. What differs is not the law but the logistics — which document you hold, how your name is rendered in Arabic versus in transliterated English across different official papers, and the fact that you are completing every step of this remotely, without a UK office or UK colleague to check your work.

This article focuses on those practicalities for an Egyptian-resident founder, director or PSC. For the underlying incorporation process itself, see our guide to forming a UK company as a non-resident.

Egyptian founders frequently hold both roles on their own company — sole director and sole shareholder-PSC — which raises a natural question: does verification cover both roles at once, or do you verify twice?

You verify your identity once, as an individual. The verification itself is not role-specific — it confirms who you are, full stop. What differs between a director and a PSC is not the verification method but the filing that depends on it: a director appointment (form AP01, or as part of incorporation on form IN01) requires the individual's personal code, and a PSC statement requires the same code attached to the PSC record. If you are both, the single personal code you obtain is referenced on both filings.

For a full breakdown of the ownership and control thresholds that decide whether you count as a PSC in the first place, see PSC declarations explained.

The second route is verification through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider (ACSP) — a UK business, typically an accountant, solicitor or company formation agent, already supervised for anti-money-laundering purposes, that Companies House has authorised to verify identities on its behalf and report the result. Instead of dealing with GOV.UK's automated system directly, you provide your documents to the ACSP, who checks them, confirms your identity to the required standard, and files the confirmation with Companies House.

UK Company Experts operates as an ACSP and offers this as a paid service at £74. For an Egyptian applicant, the practical value of this route is that a human reviews your documents before submission — catching a transliteration mismatch, a poor-quality passport scan, or a naming-order issue before it causes a formal rejection, rather than after.

Name transliteration is, in practice, the single largest cause of failed or delayed verification among Egyptian applicants — more so than document quality or expiry. Arabic names commonly include a given name, a father's name and a grandfather's name, sometimes truncated or reordered depending on which official body issued the document and when.

Common patterns that trip up an automated name match include:

• Spelling variants of the same name across documents — Mohamed, Mohammed and Muhammad, or Ahmed and Ahmad.
• A father's or grandfather's name included in full on the passport but abbreviated or dropped on an earlier UK filing, bank record or Companies House entry.
• Given-name and family-name order reversed between a document issued by an Egyptian authority and a Western-style form that assumes a single "surname" field.
• Diacritics or letter combinations (e.g. "kh", "gh", "th") rendered differently by different translation or transliteration conventions used at different times.

Before starting verification, write out your name exactly as it appears on your current passport, and compare it character-by-character against any name you have already used on a Companies House filing, a UK bank application, or an earlier UK document. If there is any discrepancy, resolve it in advance — either by using the passport version consistently going forward, or by flagging the discrepancy to an ACSP so it can be addressed with a short supporting explanation rather than discovered as a rejection.

Once verification succeeds, Companies House issues a personal code — a unique reference tied to your verified identity, not to any single company. It is typically sent by email to the address supplied during verification, usually within a few hours of a successful ACSP submission; allow up to 24 hours and check spam folders before assuming it has not arrived.

You reference this code wherever your identity needs to be attached to a Companies House filing — a new director appointment, a PSC statement, or a confirmation statement that requires it. You do not obtain a fresh code for every company: the same personal code follows you across every UK company you go on to hold a role in, unless Companies House specifically asks you to re-verify.

The personal code is not the same as a company authentication code, which is a separate code issued per company for online filings and normally sent to the company's registered office. Confusing the two is common among first-time overseas founders and can delay an otherwise straightforward filing.

This distinction is worth stating plainly, because it is the single most consequential misunderstanding we see among newly verified Egyptian founders: Companies House identity verification and a bank's, EMI's or payment provider's Know Your Customer (KYC) process are two entirely separate checks, run by two entirely separate organisations, for two entirely separate purposes.