Global Market Entry Made Easy: Entity Formation, Compliance, and Beyond

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Caitlin: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Global Market Entry Made Easy – Entity Formation, Compliance, and Beyond." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today are Rogier Bronk, John LaPalomento, and Jonathan Scrocchi. Rogier has worked across many different disciplines and with a wide variety of clients, ranging from large multinationals to private clients. With more than 25 years of experience, this has provided him with a broad understanding of client requirements that have been instrumental in helping them find the right solution to add value to the organizations. John is a Global Subsidiary Management leader. He has been with CSC for more than 14 years. John works with GSM prospects to present an accurate and clear scope of services, including demonstrating CSC Entity Management. Jonathan is a Global Subsidiary Management sales engineer for CSC. In this role, he is responsible for supporting clients and prospects throughout the service evaluation process, explaining CSC GSM scope of services, the added value for clients, and how the service delivery framework fits into resolving corporate services challenges and needs.

And with that, I'd like to welcome Rogier, John, and Jonathan.

Rogier: Thank you, Caitlin, and hello, everyone who has joined us today for a very interactive webinar. Let's go over the agenda real quick. As you can see, we're going to touch base on who we are for those who don't know or are not familiar with CSC. But also we'll touch base on our 2024 Barometer Report, some key findings. We will discuss why CSC is your preferred partner globally or just in a few jurisdictions, some of the considerations when we expand globally and how we could support you, and, of course, how we implement those solutions. And John will also go over a demo of our award-winning technology supporting our Global Subsidiary Management services.

Speaking of John, both Jonathan and myself came by way of acquisition to CSC two and a half years ago. So perhaps, John, this might be right up your alley to discuss some of the highlights on this particular slide.

John: Yeah, certainly, Rogier. I'm glad to glad to share some time today. Again everybody, my name is name is John LaPalomento. I'm a senior consultant for the suite of services here at CSC, and I'm in my 15th year here.

Rogier, you're right. While you and Jonathan came to us by way of our significant acquisition of the Intertrust Group two and a half years ago, I'm so proud of what our organization has done to fold in our services, to bring our colleagues in. And we are really happy to have all of our I'm going to say still new colleagues, although I feel like now we go back and we're thick as thieves. So I appreciate that very much.

Thank you to everybody for joining us around the world here today. I'm going to reiterate what Caitlin said. Please take advantage of the Q&A widget. We're going to answer your questions either live in the moment, if it makes sense, or we'll save them for Q&A at the end. So fill it up with great questions.

CSC, I would assume that most people on today's webinar know who we are. But we're very proud of our legacy, over 125 years of legacy serving our clients. Of course, a lot of people know us for our U.S. domestic services for great reason. We pioneered the world in terms of digital SOP delivery, in terms of registered agent services, in terms of even in some cases helping shape the corporate code. But we've been offering global services for over 70 years, both in the space of corporate secretarial services and other adjacent services around the world.

Our acquisition of the Intertrust Group further bolstered our existing suite of services, especially the suite of services in which I work and we're discussing today, our suite of Global Subsidiary Management services, our centralized proactive approach to corporate secretary services. But the acquisition of Intertrust also brings a legacy of adjacent business that CSC had not offered in the past.

So we are making a significant commitment, a financial commitment, an employment commitment, and a promise to our clients to continue to grow globally around the world, to bring a sense of experience, knowledge, and expertise to our suite of services. As you see here, we're trusted by so many different partners around the world. More than 90% of the Fortune 500 trust CSC services in some capacity. We work with over 10,000 law firms around the world. And I'm going to tell you one of the biggest commitments that I've seen in my 15 years here at CSC has been the growth of our employee base. We still have an average tenure of greater than 10 years in terms of our customer service support staff. But in my time here at CSC, we've more than quadrupled our employee headcount around the world, and I'm extremely proud of that.

Rogier: Yeah, John, I couldn't have said it better myself. One of the things that really sticks out to me as well is the longevity of the employment status of most of our new colleagues so to say, which also you hear in the market quite quickly was like, "Well, there's a lot of turnover in so-and-so office. We always have a new person to speak to." That's also something from the past, if you speak with CSC. The tenure is, indeed, I think on average what you said, John, is about 10 years. So yeah, you always have the same people supporting you.

So let's look at The General Counsel Global Barometer Report. It's a 2024 Barometer Report that we commission every year. We highlight some of the trends. We also highlight some of the challenges in there, what you can expect per jurisdiction or per region. So I really recommend downloading the 2024 version if you haven't done already. The new one, 2025 version will come out beginning of May. So we'll keep you in the loop as well, and we'll touch base on that report also in a little bit.

So when we look at the report from 2024, what really stood out to me is that only one-third, actually for both topics, right, one-third of the general counsels and compliance officers have found it difficult to understand local legal systems. But also, one-third lacks the confidence to respond quickly with in-house legal knowledge.

Now, Jonathan, specifically to South America or Central and South America, is this also something what you see on a on a day-to-day basis when clients come to us?

Jonathan: Yes. Hi, Rogier and everybody that's joining us today. To your question, yes, we're actually getting more and more recurring inquiries where corporate legal teams reach out to us to kind of get some reassurance as to whether they're managing their compliance for their global subsidiaries accurately through the current vendors or partners that they might have in-country, mainly on the legislative updates. As we all know, corporate governance, it's a living animal. It does change throughout every year. Laws and regulations and local legislations do change and always have a direct impact.

And going back to the Barometer Report, where we find that only a third of general counsels find that they have actual control of what these updates are and that their subsidiaries are being managed correctly, I come to disagree and kind of agree with your comment because really the corporate legal teams that these general counsels are managing, who are the ones that are reaching out to us to get this additional expertise and handholding, to get that reassurance, essentially are mentioning the opposite, right? They don't have that much clarity. They're not comfortable with what is being done in-country, specifically in the LATAM region. So we do definitely provide a significant added value through our service offering.

Rogier: Do you think it's more like a false positive, right? Obviously, one-third to me is a very low percentage of clients that we speak to, because it's the majority that doesn't have good insight or accurate information up to date. And especially if you work with local counsel, we all know that every single provider has a fiduciary duty to inform its clients about legal status and changes in-country, but it's how this is being pushed to the client, right? Are you really mitigating your risk if you have to read a newsletter or a mass email that starts with Brazilian tax regime is changing, right?

So the one-third that lacks the confidence, it seems a little bit low. And it might be false positive. But what's your take on that, and why should they choose for CSC?

Jonathan: No, I agree. Normally, from our experience with multinationals that are engaged with independent law firms in-country, the law firms do help them, let's say, get established with an entity and might provide initial assistance with fulfilling the annual obligations. But essentially, when these changes and regulations take place, there's a lack of that proactive approach that we at CSC take with the risk mitigation and truly informing our clients of those changes taking place, what actions need to be taken, and what remedial work is needed.

The standard method so to say is, like you mentioned, to issue and share newsletters. But then it's up to the client to know and to read it. If you don't read it, then you're not up to date. That's the key difference between CSC and local partners or vendors, where we take full action, a proactive approach to servicing our clients and being constantly on the lookout for what might impact the good standing of their entities globally. And that goes with our motto we're the business behind business, right?

Rogier: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that, Jonathan. And yeah, that almost brings us to why CSC, right? The reason why we're on today's webinar is to provide you with insight in how we operate our Global Subsidiary Management service delivery framework, what the key differentiators are, and what we bring to the table. So why CSC?

And I think one of the brief introductions that we initially had about who we are, what sets us apart from the competition, and I think these core values really do us justice when it comes to following through on these core values that we have. These days every single provider out there that calls them a global provider of corporate secretarial services has a single point of contact, most likely provides a master service agreement or has fixed fees for the annual obligations. So on face value, there might not be really a real difference between providers out there.

So it's important to really find out who CSC is, and we do that based on our core values. And these five values are not just simple bullet points to us. We live by this. Jonathan, you mentioned we are the business behind the business. Other things are our fierce client spirit. But John, perhaps as you've been longer with CSC and these core values have been around for I want to say decades, but it's really what we truly live by and sets the tone for how we put our service delivery framework in place, how we work together with now your new colleagues, with former Intertrust offices, etc. So maybe you can highlight a few based on your expertise and tenure with CSC.

John: Well, I'll tell you, Rogier, in my tenure with CSC, one of the things that's impressed me is that our core values are not just a slide in presentations. They really do govern the way we operate, the way we communicate with our external clients. Very importantly and critically because of the amount of team-driven deliverable and workflow here at CSC, we do bifurcate different teams with different strengths and different responsibilities the way that we utilize our values when working together with other teams around the world. There was a time in my tenure here at CSC where I was largely working with our Wilmington-based staff, and now I'm so happy to be working with our teams globally around the world, throughout Europe, throughout Asia, throughout the Middle East, throughout Oceana. And to be able to live these values for our new colleagues as part of the Intertrust acquisition, to adopt these values the way they have, it's been really impressive from my point of view, and I know from others here as well.

Our clients will feel these values in the way that we communicate and the way that we deliver service. There's a true sense of responsibility to serve our client as opposed to just getting this deliverable off of my desk, this email out of my email. It really does come down to understanding our clients' needs, building bespoke services, and, of course, this is very true in the avenue through which we're exploring today, Global Subsidiary Management. But this is also something that resonates through all of our different lines of work, whether it's Delaware franchise tax payment or global fund management. We're here to really take an agile, tenacious, and genuine approach to everything we do, to work with our teams around the world, and to maximize the benefits that we bring, and to understand that, at our core, we're a service company and we're here to serve our clients.

Rogier: Absolutely. Yeah. And, of course, it comes back to the fact that we're not here to make a quick buck to make our shareholders happy in the upcoming three years. It goes back to being privately owned for 125 years, third generation, the longevity of the employees and their tenure with CSC confirms this, that we have a longer outlook.

John, you mentioned that our services are bespoke. Our clients are in the driver's seat. They have a particular vision of how they would like to implement their in-house legal team when it comes to corporate secretarial services. We listen, we implement, and we adapt because 12 months from now your organization might also look different. Hence, ours was different three years ago as well.

So yeah, teamwork, absolutely true. With the addition of Intertrust colleagues, we have a ton of subject matter experts in-country. And our framework also allows to connect our clients with these subject matter experts. Sometimes it goes beyond the realm of corporate secretarial service, and you would like to sit down with someone who has more knowledge of tax or finance in a particular jurisdiction.

So thank you for that. But Jonathan, anything that stands out to you? It's like you and I are both new to the CSC organization, and I can only confirm that I agree with everything John is saying so far. So anything that stood out for you?

Jonathan: Yes. I mean, beyond CSC thriving for providing excellent customer service and kind of blending our values of teamwork, tenacity, and agility, that truly becomes for our clients it's the quality of service that we provide and it's the mix of these values by which we're able to provide the services in this capacity. I mean, we always pursue from the start to build good relationships with our clients. We take or provide a customized approach to best, yeah, adhere to our clients' infrastructure, their teams, how to establish a solid framework by which we will be able to service them for multiple amounts of years, right?

Rogier: Yeah, absolutely. So let's look at some of the considerations for global entities solutions, the framework, but also how we address local versus centralized maintenance. Perhaps, John, this might be a good one for you since we initially focused more on the U.S. domestic side. The last 15 plus years, you also have been in the international side, which was operating slightly different before Intertrust was acquired. But local support versus centralized maintenance, any thoughts?

John: Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts. When I think of localized support, I see two different avenues for this. Clients come to us with two unique challenges, the first being we at our organization have different people responsible for the management of subsidiaries locally. So they have a contact or a colleague in India responsible for their Indian entities and a contact in France responsible for their French entities and a colleague in Brazil responsible for their Brazilian entities. And what you have is a complete lack of efficiency. You have duplicative efforts. You have a lack of I'll say consistency in terms of how things are managed around the world. And most commonly, you don't have any transparency into what is actually happening. It's challenging to keep track of data. It's challenging to understand where things have changed. And the central, I'll say the headquarters or the HQ doesn't have the visibility that's needed in order navigate a global business these days. So that's the first point.

Rogier: Yeah. But, John, it's just a few hundred dollars cheaper in-country if we go with a local approach, right?

John: Worth every penny, worth every peso or euro. Yes.

Rogier: Yeah.

John: The second example I see are organizations who are taking the first step to centralize and to find efficiencies, but they're doing so centrally managing their corporate secretarial obligations around the world, but doing so with a myriad of different vendors around the world. So yes, we're centralizing this through headquarters or regionally, but we have different law firms, different trust companies, different service providers in different corners of the world. And you have the time zone challenges and the language challenges. You have a lack of understanding in terms of what actually has to happen in jurisdictions because it's not beautifully organized. You once again are highlighted with that lack of transparent data around the world. And again, you're duplicating your efforts. A director change that impacts 10 entities in 10 countries is 10 projects for an organization managing it that way.

And, of course, one of the things we're going to highlight today is how we can truly centralize not only the workflows around corporate secretarial governance but automate the data and document capture and bring transparency to all of our clients in the way we do that.

Rogier: Yeah. And what would you advise the attendees who are listening and dialed in today if they are decentralized and currently work with local offices or local partners in-country, if they want to go to a centralized servicing framework but are decentralized themselves, how would that match?

John: Here's the critical point for me. And I've seen hundreds of organizations very successfully move to a centralized approach, but I've also seen pitfalls. The biggest pitfall is not communicating from the top down, not having a directive. Not saying local entity, you no longer need to worry about your corporate secretarial obligation because we're going to support that. Don't get me wrong. There's great knowledge around the world. There might be people who you want on that team. But generally, your local entities don't want to deal with this. They want to work on revenue-generating activity, and this is one more grind to their day that by communicating the fact you're changing your approach can really boost your productivity around the world.

Rogier: Okay. Thank you, John. Advisory versus best practices, it's a gray area, right, to be really honest and especially since we take a very consultative approach to implement the solution that we have here at CSC. But if you would have to address it, Jonathan, what's your take on this, and how would you go about it?

Jonathan: Yeah. This is definitely a good point to touch on. So corporate service providers fall in a niche industry. Although we are embedded in the corporate legal work, global subsidiary management, global subsidiary corporate governance is a discipline in its own right, correct?

So one key differentiator between providers, such as law firms with corporate service providers like ourselves, is that we do not provide legal advice. Now that doesn't mean that we are unable to support our clients. It's all the opposite. We are able to provide the handholding, the in-country expertise. And the way that we have framed our service delivery allows us to truly provide that quality service that multinationals need and their teams need in maintaining global portfolios of entities.

Rogier: So while we are unable to advise on the structure or the entity type in a specific jurisdiction or which entity type our clients need to set up, we receive those type of questions quite often. What do we normally respond to these type of questions? Because it's something that we can still support, but not on an advisory capacity. So how would you go about that?

Jonathan: Yeah. So using an example of a multinational or a client wants to establish an entity in a new jurisdiction, like you said, we're unable or in no position to say for tax and accounting purposes what type of structure to establish. Now once that decision is made by them and by support of their legal counsel, we're able to then walk them through the process, outline what is needed, and again, from a service delivery standpoint, take the bulk administrative work and the tasks to accomplish that, right?

Rogier: Absolutely. Yeah. And then, of course, we have so much information on file, and we have our subject matter experts in-country. So if a client comes to us and says like, "Well, I don't know if I have to go to Poland or Bulgaria or Romania. But can you tell me which are the most common entity types and how long the information timelines are?" We have country fact sheets that we can provide to our clients, even though we have those jurisdictions not under administration. So at all times utilizing your dedicated single point of contact through which you have access to our Knowledge Bank, which is all based on best practices, might already answer 80% of the questions of our clients, which also limits the time that they need to connect with outside legal counsel or a tax firm, cutting that bill tremendously down to an affordable invoice.

Jonathan: So yeah, no. And beyond that, one of the beauties of CSC's Global Subsidiary Management framework is that we don't force clients out of their existing relationships with local legal counsels or consulting groups. We essentially adhere to them by the corporate governance administrative work. So one of the beauties, again, for our clients is that they can retain those existing relationships for other corporate legal matters, and we specialize in what our bread and butter is, which is the corporate governance and Global Subsidiary Management, right?

Rogier: Yeah, yeah, correct. So fixed versus bespoke service delivery framework, number three on this particular slide. We already highlighted the fact that we have a consultative approach to implementing this solution, but it starts by listening to our clients. Often providers out there, they force their solution to their clients because they have maybe a very fixed framework that cannot be deviated from and you only have to work with the single point of contact. Others have a very large, wholly-owned footprint only to find out that it is simply being coordinated and push through, which creates delays in service delivery. You still have to work with in-country local offices. So consistency in service delivery might not be what you're expecting.

Of course, global law firms or regional law firms or even local law firms, they have a partner structure, which bumps into the issue with the fact that consistency in service delivery that John mentioned, the change of director in multiple jurisdictions, you would like to know how long this is going to take per jurisdiction. You might have a stakeholder that requests on Monday morning what is the status of this and why are these two jurisdictions still pending.

Consistency in service delivery is key to our service offering, which means that bespoke service delivery, creating that framework that really fits your specific requirements and needs, which are evolving. They are not fixed today. They're still variable, and 12 months from now you might have different requirements. But every in-house legal team general counsel has a specific vision of how he wants to approach this. So it starts with listening in a consultative way, providing the solution, and then implementing. Along the way, we can still change it. So it's very important that we bring a bespoke service solution to the table.

Now let's actually look at some of the case studies that we're going to discuss going forward. It might be more in line of where the attendees are coming from, whether that's a large, a midcap, or a small startup. So let's have a look.

This particular client, large, multinational Fortune 500, large global entity footprint, 45 jurisdictions. We heard it before. It's a very decentralized operating model, but it does have an entity management system. So from a current state, they don't like working with multiple vendors. It is not really consistent service delivery, as we just mentioned that our bespoke service solution does provide. They're not really 100% sure about the compliance status. And they would like to centralize the service solution with one global provider. They're also are missing the proactive approach that they thought they would receive from their local outside counsel, and that's why they're also challenging the fact that they might not be really compliant.

So looking at this, Jonathan, how would you approach this? What would be the best first, second, and third step?

Jonathan: Yeah. So normally, in the first step, we identify where the client is at, like you're seeing or we like we're portraying in the slide, and then what it is essentially what they want to achieve. And this is where we take that consultative approach that you mentioned. Based upon the pillars and the challenges that we identify, we truly, on a second step, try to hash out what the true challenges are with their current setup, how we can adhere to their current setup and framework with their teams, not only in one country, but normally multinationals with this size of a portfolio have regional teams.

So we truly try to understand how that communication is currently working, how the technology piece of an entity management system would come into play. We would provide the guidance as to how the data migration would take place, how we can set up the invoicing under our contractual framework on a global contract, and essentially just really identifying what the current pains and hurdles are and try to best fill in those gaps with our framework. And again, going back to what I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, is how to build that solid relationship from day one, where we become an extension of our client's legal team and truly fill in the gap, take over the bulk administrative work that essentially allows them to expand their bandwidth to get better organized and to streamline and truly centralize all the subsidiary governance administration, right?

Rogier: Yeah. And Jonathan mentioned some really good points because when I look at future state, preferred future state, right, it's just five bullet points, which we often see in RFP as well. And then we start to work, and then we realize halfway our response in the RFP was like, it's just five bullet points. This can't be true. Have they thought about what Jonathan mentioned, how the invoicing is, what currency, the frequency? Is it from our parent to their parent? Is it from our parent to local office? So there are so many additional questions to be asked in order to get to a really solid solution that works for our clients.

Let's say we have a solution worked out that our client is interested in. How would we facilitate a smooth transition from the current situation to CSC?

John: This is the nature of a bespoke service, to Jonathan's credit, is identifying the goals of our clients, which means once we identify the goals and we build the solution, we fabricate the right piece that fits to do what they want, whether that's complete centralization by way of four contacts in one building or centralization regionally with different contacts in different corners around the world, that's also going to shape the way our transition works. And we're going to talk more specifically about the CSC services around onboarding.

To answer a question that came in from Mark K, there was a question about due diligence types of screening and research of foreign entities that already exist. I'm going to answer this question kind of in context now.

Rogier: Yeah, go ahead.

John: Part of our transition is doing the research and understanding the current picture, the current status, jurisdictional information about each entity at the time of transfer. And we'll talk more about our corporate health check and exactly how that ties that into place.

The transfer itself is going to look very different for different organizations and different portfolios. In this case, with 112 entities that we can probably assume are around the world, we're going to take probably a phased approach. Now we're set up to move the entire portfolio at the same time. But in order to satisfy the KYC and AML due diligence requests, quite frankly 112 entities will be a heavy lift for our clients. We want to set you up to succeed and advise you as to how we can make the transition a simpler process for you and you can find efficiencies in terms of the data that you're providing to us. So oftentimes we'll talk about a regional transition. We'll talk about areas of concern. The important thing to understand is that not only are our final services that we deliver handled in a bespoke fashion, but the transition is handled with logic and thought behind it, a dedicated project manager who specializes in the transition of the portfolio to CSC, and of course our years and years of experience doing so successfully.

Rogier: Yeah. Yeah, after we execute the agreement and all parties are quite happy to get started, we also look at the bandwidth, of course, because all of a sudden it's being put or placed on a desk from someone in their in-house legal team, that then all of a sudden need to provide these type of documents anywhere from every single entity that we're going to have under administration. So sometimes we look at which entities they think are non-compliant, phased approach, like you said John, or indeed working with the bandwidth. Sometimes it's just simply impossible to get a 50-entity portfolio onboard it ASAP. There are other tasks competing for this onboarding process. And again, we are situated in such a way that we can handle any request throughout the onboarding process.

But let's have a look at what might actually be one of our more common company profiles that we work with. This is a smaller multinational, with only 25 entities in 12 jurisdictions. Same thing, multiple vendors on location. It's not an odd thing that we bump into because it's actually more a logical thing. They've had outside legal counsel that assisted them with the legal advice on how to expand globally. They might have been referred by that law firm to a partner in their network locally that has set up the jurisdiction. But it's often the cutoff moments, like 25 entities, actually sometimes even 20 entities or less depending on the activity of the organization, they were like, "Okay, I don't have an entity management system. I have all these different vendors in-country. I want to go to one provider with a centralized service approach."

So John, again, not to get in repetitiveness with the previous one, but how would we approach this, and what can we bring to the table for this specific client?

John: Yeah, this is a really I'll say a common company profile that comes our way. We work with clients with 3 entities in 3 jurisdictions and with 1,000 entities in 150 jurisdictions. But this spot here, about 25 entities, oftentimes by way of organic growth or sudden growth by way of merger or acquisition, brings some real challenges that are felt. It starts to get heavy, when you get to this point, facilitating multiple vendors around the world. And again, what I mentioned earlier, the lack of transparency is an absolute killer when you're trying to manage entities around the world.

What CSC will bring to a company like this is a single point of contact, who is proactive, who's going to take on the burden of managing the obligations that are due around the world. Now I never say the word "outsourcing." I think that's an unfair word to say. We do not have a magic wand to make this work go away. We need to work together with you. CSC is a resource, a tremendous resource. Your project manager and you'll be on a first name basis with your project manager, you'll be business friends with your project manager, and that project manager acts as a concierge for your corporate secretarial needs around the world. So if you're managing, in this case, 12 different jurisdictions, a handful of different entities in each jurisdiction, being able to find efficiencies with your workflows and very importantly being able to leverage CSC's proprietary technology in an automated fashion is going to bring the visibility to your scope of business around the world in a way that you simply wouldn't see.

Clients come to us either with no technology in place or with technology that lacks trust. The one thing that you can always rest assured with CSC is that the technology that we put in your hands is going to be trustworthy because it is the workbench through which we manage your entity data. It is imperative that it's maintained. We need to maintain it in order to manage your entities. The beautiful benefit of that is your trust in the data that we hand to you.

Rogier: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, John. I think we have one more case study, yeah, here it is, that addresses the M&A activity and how we can how we can also support our clients with M&A activity. Jonathan, you've worked with a lot of clients that are rapidly expanding globally or that have acquired a significant amount of entities around the globe. So what would your advice, if we're able to use that word, be to support them with their future required state?

Jonathan: Yeah. So as you all mentioned, I do come across these type of profiles quite often. And normally, the initial conversations are about the current state being a logistical nightmare because through the M&A transaction, you're suddenly onboarding a number of entities in new jurisdictions where the client's team doesn't have the knowledge they need to start doing immediate work. They're working against the clock. It is somewhat unclear on how project management or to project manage this type of activity. They're understaffed, again because the company is expanding.

So again, taking this consultative approach of clearly understanding how they're currently set up, what the project entails, allows us to then cater to those needs. As John mentioned in the previous case study, we take hands-on responsibility from the get-go in assigning a project manager that assists with putting all this organized bulk work coming our clients' way in an orderly fashion to help them execute and be able to onboard these number of entities and then reorganize their portfolio accordingly.

Rogier: Jonathan, we talked about consistency in service delivery is key to CSC. How would we deal with projects of a particular size and still adhering to our service-level agreements and performing on the same consistency in service delivery? How would we go about that?

Jonathan: So one of the beauties of engaging CSC is that we're able to easily and quickly scale up our resources. So according to the type of project that we are to handle, we would put the right people in place. And the right people, I mean not only a project manager, but also our in-country matter experts that support the client service delivery teams who will manage and are in contact with our clients on a day-to-day basis. So truly it's not just a service delivery, right? There's a lot of framework human resource that we're providing in our solution for our clients, and that is by way of expertise in-country and the resources that we have managed to put together to extend to them. So by easily being able to scale up, it allows us to have that key value that we mentioned at the beginning, which is the agility to adapt and be able to render that quality service that we strive for.

Rogier: Okay. Yeah, I think it's important to note and for the attendees of this webinar service-level agreements are there to ensure that we have consistency in service delivery, whether it's one client or multiple clients all of a sudden have a project in specific jurisdictions. And that's why we have often more than one office in each of the jurisdictions, not only to connect our clients with subject matter experts with the branch that they're in. Some of our subject matter experts are better equipped to discuss with pharmaceutical or manufacturing or IT, while others are more equipped with agriculture or science branches of technology.

So we try to commit to the consistency in service delivery the access to subject matter experts and group the projects as such and scale up as you said, Jonathan. So it's very important to know that, first and foremost, consistency in service delivery, that's what makes our clients happy, and grouping any projects, pricing them as such, which always is more economical than going one by one in-country, especially when you talk about M&A activity that has a lot of corporate changes, etc.

So John, we've been talking about M&A transactions. But this is actually similar to when clients rapidly are expanding to all corners of the globe. Same approach, difference?

John: I would say there's some natural difference just regionally around the world. But the beauty of CSC is consistency. There's no need to shop for vendors in different jurisdictions. You have a trusted partner in CSC. There's no reason to understand or set up to be able to pay in different currencies around the world, unless your goal is that, right? But CSC offers flexibility and most commonly flat-rate costs in U.S. dollars or a preferred currency to make things easy for you.

So the consistency that we're going to offer to our clients is key. That's not to say that we're going to treat a Hong Kong private limited company the same way we would treat a Delaware LLC because they're very different. But we're going to bring consistency in terms of how you're working with us and how we're delivering information.

Rogier: And how does that work with our contractual framework? Do we have to go through the whole terms and conditions again, or sign a local agreement? Or how does that work?

John: Again, a beautiful part of our business is that you're contracting with CSC, with a global ambition in terms of what is necessary around the world. You have one service agreement overall governing the relationship. And when you have additional jurisdictions to add, whether it's a new business for you or an acquisition, we simply tack on a new statement of work to memorialize the rates and services. But it's all governed under one agreement.

There are times, I'll mention to be fair, where you might need certain local needs. If you need CSC to fulfill a residency obligation for a local director or a company secretary obligation for a resident company secretary, there are some jurisdictions that govern that those agreements have to be in place locally. But it's simple. We have our offices that would facilitate that for you and make it easy. Again, the services and pricing still governed by our global agreement.

Rogier: Fantastic, yeah. Thanks for adding that, John. So okay, also in the area of time, we have about 15 minutes left. Let's look at our Global Subsidiary Management Service offering. I'm a very visual person. So for me, we have already discussed this throughout the webinar, but I think making it visual really sets the tone for how we bring our services.

Here, you can see as a client you have direct contact with our CSC and GSM Global Subsidiary Management Service, our dedicated servicing team, which acts as a single point of contact. The arrows to each of the jurisdictions are both ways, right?

First and foremost, as John and Jonathan were mentioning, you have access to subject matter experts in-country. Sometimes it goes beyond the realm of CoSec, and you need to speak to somebody who's a CPA or equivalent in any of the jurisdictions that are more tax heavy, and we make that available.

But it's also the other way around. Our local offices inform a dedicated team inside CSC headquarters about all of the legislative changes internally. That team, which is our Knowledge Bank team, sift through all those mass emails and newsletters that you would actually receive from your in-country providers. They will go through that, so that's the first administrative burden that has been taken away, so that our client-facing teams have accurate information to say like, "Okay, your Brazilian Ltda is ongoing a change based on local legislation. If we don't do anything in the upcoming six months, you will be non-compliant. These are the steps that we can take. Which one do you prefer?" And we'll take action. And that's our proactive approach to changes in local legislation.

Also, it was mentioned earlier that our clients have access to this Knowledge Bank as well. It's a depository of the latest documents and the latest legislation. Our country fact sheets are in there as well. So, as I mentioned, if you want to know the entity types in Romania versus Poland or Bulgaria and timelines for formation, we can provide this to you.

Now the follow the sun principle, that's something that has been around at CSC ever since they started providing global services. John, I think this is really good for you to take on as the longest-standing employee at CSC at the moment between the three of us.

John: Yeah. Well, of course, from my perspective, one of the most celebrated parts of our services are the centralized points of contact. But know that you have regional points of contact and in-country points of contact when necessary. Truly a follow the sun model. It sounds cheesy, but I'm going to say it. The sun never sets on CSC. So if something comes up in the middle of our night, it might be perfectly in line for our Singapore team to be able to handle an emergency situation in Singapore. If you need to work with hubs for this service, we have I'll say client-facing hubs here in Wilmington, Delaware, out of our European headquarters in London, out of our Asian headquarters in India, and other client-facing offices around the world. So you can always lean on us, whether it is a regularly scheduled obligation or a need to have this moment urgent matter.

Rogier: Thank you. I think, Jonathan, for you and me, this was a very, very welcome change of pace, having a follow the sun customer service principle already in place when we started with CSC. Anything that you would like to highlight?

Jonathan: No, most definitely. I mean, the slide that we're showing right now perfectly portrays that.

Rogier: Okay.

Jonathan: So our clients can have that reliability that we can render the services 24/7 across the globe.

Rogier: Okay. Thank you. Well, John, while you were speaking, Entity Management platform, our or award-winning tool. I can only say that Jonathan and I were jealous of this Entity Management system when we were still at Intertrust. So I might be a little bit biased in the sense that I'm really happy that we have this platform. But, of course, we're system agnostic, so it doesn't really matter. We can work with any system. But maybe you can highlight some of the features.

John: Yeah, I'm happy to do so. I'm going to give an extremely abbreviated demonstration of this technology here. But what's important to know is that this is CSC's proprietary technology. I'm going to be very blunt in saying this. While we are system agnostic, you're going to have your best experience with CSC in working with our technology. The majority of CSC clients are already utilizing this technology. This technology is trusted by over 90% of the Fortune 500, and it's been ranked for over the last decade as the number one entity management technology by the readers of the "New York Law Journal."

The key function here is that we bring automation. So we're not throwing data at you and hoping you get your hands dirty and organize it in a piece of technology. We are organizing the data for you.