The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has signed a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to streamline business registration by enabling secure, faster inter-agency access to corporate records via the SEC’s Swift Corporate and Other Records Exchange (SCORE) Protocol. Under the arrangement, the SEC will give the DTI access to relevant corporate documents, including articles of incorporation, general information sheets, and annual financial statements, to support the DTI’s mandate in regulating business transactions of sole proprietorships. In return, the DTI will provide the SEC access to its business entity name or trademark registry through an application programming interface (API) connected to the Business Entity Name Registration System (BNRS), supporting a more comprehensive name verification process intended to prevent registration of identical or confusingly similar names. The agreement marks the SEC’s second SCORE Protocol collaboration, following a July 2024 arrangement with the Bureau of Internal Revenue.