Registry searches underpin every significant transaction in Canada; Regy is building the infrastructure that powers them
If every public registry in Canada shut down tonight, the economy would grind to a halt. From M&A to commercial lending, access to that data is fundamental. Without it, the legal machinery underpinning those transactions collapses — and deals can’t proceed at all.
Registry solutions have been woefully underbuilt and underserviced relative to their importance, but that’s starting to change.
“As AI adoption accelerates, organizations are recognizing that data integrity and accessibility remain the foundation of effective technology infrastructure”, says Michael Cain, CEO of Regy.
From the background to the spotlight
Registry searches are the cornerstone of any purchase or financing of a business. They query Canada’s public registries to establish facts and uncover any red flags. For example, these searches determine whether the company actually exists and is in good standing, whether any of the company’s assets have been secured as collateral, or whether the corporation or any shareholders, principals, officers, or directors are involved in litigation or bankruptcy proceedings. A buyer or lender who skips thorough registry searches or doesn’t analyze the results carefully may be closing on a transaction with unknown risks and liabilities.
Despite the critical role of this step, fragmentation is a major challenge. Registries are far from uniform. Each jurisdiction has its own legislative and regulatory framework, meaning that a law clerk may have to navigate half a dozen portals for one transaction.
“There could be 10, 15, or 20 sources they need information from and that would involve searching the same name in different databases up to 20 different times,” explains Nelson Coombs, VP of Business Development and Registry Support at Regy. “It's a very expensive and time-consuming way to complete these searches, especially when time is a limited resource.”
The problem doesn't end with retrieval. Once results come back from various sources in a dozen different formats, firms have historically had to manually copy and paste everything into due diligence reports and letters — a second layer of repetitive work that adds time and cost but no analytical value.
The industry is beginning to recognize there must be a better way, as firms increasingly pay close attention to what’s eating up time and margins. Elevating practice workflows into more modern processes is well underway, including those related to corporate and financing transactions. But until recently, legal technology has focused on the more visible steps — document management, e-signing, deal rooms, contract review — while the essential but unglamorous registry data remained in the background.
“There's an appetite now for solutions that actually address these concerns, backed by companies who understand the ins and outs of this niche area,” Cain says. “That's possible with purpose-built tooling, deep experience in the space, automated summary reports, transparent pricing, and a support model that aligns with the actual work — it's a meaningful step forward from there.” Regy is now relied on by the largest law firms in Canada, supporting billions of dollars worth of transactions each year.
One search, every source
While there are meaningful improvements happening to the decades old registries themselves, the real sea change isn’t coming from the government-run piece. Beyond the longer timelines and market resistance that one might expect in completely overhauling a registry system, the governments’ obligation is to serve the public good, and not just the needs of sophisticated legal professionals.
“When we’re talking about the information relied upon for a complex or multi-jurisdictional transaction, the requirements of a law firm are more demanding,” Coombs notes.
Even if access is easier, “you still need something to aggregate, connect, interpret and make uniform all these different registry sources,” Cain adds.
“The technology layer is the part that's going to bring this all together much quicker and in a much more user-friendly format, and that’s where Regy can have a massive impact.”
Born out of Cain’s front-row frustration — originally a corporate lawyer with an engineering background, Cain left to launch Regy after a long night summarizing PPSA searches and “realizing I didn’t want to ever do this manually a second time,” he adds — the platform analyzes and consolidates results from all registry sources into a single report. It manages jurisdictional quirks so the experience on the law firm's end is quick and seamless regardless of where the searches originate.
Regy also handles those tedious next steps including interpreting data that arrives in inconsistent formats across jurisdictions and transposing it automatically into due diligence reports and letters.
“Instead of accomplishing one search in 10 minutes, Regy delivers search results from 20 different sources in 10 minutes, professionally summarized,” Coombs explains, adding that the time saved can be reinvested in what can’t be automated, such as client conversations, issue identification and resolution, and moving the transaction forward.
The efficiency gains compound as deals grow more complex.
“And when there's somebody breathing down your neck because the deal closing is at 5pm,” Coombs says. “Don’t underestimate the benefit of having a team to lean on that not only understands the technology, but the pressures of a law firm itself.”
Regy: built for registry services
Coombs, who has spent 26 years in the industry, connected with Cain over what he calls a "granular nerd-like fascination" with registry services. That depth, Coombs argues, is exactly what's at stake when choosing a platform.
“When registry searches are your primary product, like it is for us, you invest in them thoroughly — that's harder to do when it's just one feature of many,” he says. “You want a specialist rather than a generalist when hundreds of millions of dollars of deals are on the line.”
On a platform where searches are secondary, product decisions get made around the main business. Improvements take a back seat. Support staff spread thin across offerings can't deliver the subject matter expertise that edge cases demand.
Purpose-built solutions by contrast are designed around maximizing the value of every keystroke and mouse click.
“A lot of what Regy has developed has come from listening to our customers and actioning those requests — not putting them on a product roadmap that takes two years to address,” Cain says. “We're not waiting for registries to modernize or for firms to restructure their workflows. We're building within those workflows and removing steps and processes that don't add value.”
This article was produced in partnership with Regy
