Streamline Entity Management with
CSC—Including New Features

Caitlin: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Streamline Entity Management with CSC." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator. Joining us today are Andrea Jonaitis and David Jeffries.

Andrea is a product manager in the Corporate and Legal Solutions Group at CSC. Since joining CSC in 2017, Andrea has specialized in global subsidiary management and entity management, working with prospects to present an accurate and clear scope of services, including helping subsidiaries stay in compliance as well as demonstrating CSC Entity Management. David is Senior Director of Product Management for Global Compliance and Governance Services at CSC in the Wilmington, Delaware headquarters. David is responsible for driving the strategic direction of CSC's compliance solutions. With CSC for over 15 years, he has significant experience providing training, implementation, and consolidative service to clients of CSC Entity Management.

And with that, let's welcome Andrea and David.

Andrea: Good morning or good afternoon, everyone. We're so happy to have you here with us wherever you're joining from.

David: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining. We're really excited about today's presentation. And really without further ado, we want to dive in and talk about our agenda. We think we've got a lot of great content that folks will be interested in.

As Caitlin, our moderator, mentioned, if you do have questions at any moment, use that Q&A widget. We'll probably try to do a little bit of answering some of those questions throughout the webinar, but then certainly look to make sure that we have time at the end to answer some of the questions as well.

So really the agenda is very simple. We're going to talk briefly about CSC as a company. We know that certainly we have a lot of folks on the line that use CSC currently, but also those that are not with us currently as a customer. So we want to talk a bit about CSC as an organization. I want to make sure that we're all on the same page when we talk about entity management. Sometimes it can mean different things to different people. So we want to level set and talk about what we mean by that terminology. And then really what we're going to do is focus on a number of enhancements in the CSC Entity Management software platform. And then my colleague Andrea is going to give a demonstration of, again, some of those latest and greatest capabilities, again with some questions and answers along the way.

So, for me, really I get the pleasure of starting off by talking about CSC as an organization. And as you look at some of the kind of information there in the statistics, I want to provide a kind of a little more detail on CSC as an organization.

So CSC is a global compliance provider, with over 3,000 employees in 14 countries and 46 locations. As a company, we're able to trace our routes all the way back to 1899. We offer really a wide breadth of compliance services, but it's fair to say that we're best known as a registered agent. We're very proud to say that we're the largest registered agent by market share. As an organization, we're privately held. Our global headquarters is in Wilmington, Delaware. And you'll see one of the stats there on the side that talks about the fact that over 90% of the Fortune 500 use CSC for at least one of our services.

And it's really exciting to share that as it specifically relates to the Entity Management software that we'll see today, over 20% of the Fortune 500 use CSC Entity Management as their subsidiary management technology. And really as kind of an organization here at CSC, our mission is to provide solutions that integrate our world-class service, compelling technology, and also provide our clients with actionable data.

So that's just a little bit about who we are as an organization. With that, I get to bring my colleague Andrea into the conversation by again breaking down what we mean when we start talking about entity management. So, Andrea, I'll turn it over to you.

Andrea: Absolutely. Thanks, David. I think probably many of our attendees today already know the definition of entity management, but we want to state it briefly here as sometimes we use the term to define various aspects of corporate compliance and portfolio management. And as David said, we want to make sure that we're all on the same page here.

So, generally speaking, entity management is a multi-department discipline that involves the overall management of your entity portfolio and keeping your company and your entities in compliance with the various international, federal, state, and local requirements. Sometimes a person might say entity management when they're actually referring to the filing of annual reports, but this is just one of the many components that are required for remaining in compliance.

So entity management is also inclusive of things like the management of your data, keeping your entities straight and your records, your appointment tracking, your ownership records, jurisdictions, all of the data associated with entities, storing the documents and records as they're related to the entities inside of the platform, being able to handle compliance communication, being able to collaborate, making sure that you are in alignment with the requirements and completing the requirements and filings that are required in order to remain in good corporate health. And, of course, reporting is at the center of all of your entity management needs. Providing internal and external parties with secure access to your entity records or your documents can not only create transparency, but it is going to be able to increase your collaborative capabilities as well.

So leveraging entity management software, this software is specialized software that is designed to make those components of entity management more streamlined and centralized for your teams, both internal and external teams. You might need to collaborate with outside partners, counsel, auditors. So it's really critical that all of those parties that need to be involved with this process have the ability inside of a software to collaborate in that type of a way.

Entity management software serves as your main source of truth for managing entity data, being able to track ownership records and generating graphic or text-based organization structure charts, being able to track officer or director information. We use this classification of officers or directors kind of loosely because you might also need to track things like members, managers, partners powers of attorney, signing authorities, maybe some other custom roles and titles. So we kind of all group that into directors and officers. But there's a lot of other appointments and key people or entities that you might want to track within that concept of directors and officers.

Entity management software also helps you to manage your electronic minute books and your documents. It's going to be great for generating reports. Hopefully a good software will have pre-built reports available for you. Hopefully your software is also going to give you a tremendous amount of flexibility to generate your own reports and to be able to pull the reporting and analyses that are most critical to your organization. And arguably the most critical, receiving alerts and reminders for the many different events and deadlines that you need to manage for your entities kind of all around the globe here.

So lastly, why implement entity management software? This is so important now more than ever, given the changing landscape, the way that COVID has impacted the way we operate our businesses. Given the fact that regulatory complexities just continues to grow all around the world, it can be really tough to keep up with the changes. And a good entity management software is going to really help your team to stay on top of those changes, those complexities, providing you real-time access to the data and documents and the things that your team needs.

Entity management software can help you to avoid pitfalls and unnecessary risks as your organization navigates through county, state, international, local filing requirements. There are so many different roles and so many different jurisdictions, and a good entity management software is going to help you to organize that and keep that all straight and keep that transparency across your teams.

This software will provide you with centralization, collaboration, and efficient access to the documents and records, insurance that your documents are up to date, accurate, and complete, and making it that centralized platform for accessing those real-time documents and items.

Advanced solutions, advanced entity management solutions can provide you with more than just a repository. We're talking more than just storage for data and documents. The best types of solutions will be highly configurable for your specific needs, and they're going to provide tracking and reporting that is very specific to exactly what you need from that type of a software. These types of platforms can provide workflow automation. They can streamline your processes for filings, assist with managing entity life cycle events. The software can enable transparency throughout all of these processes. Robust reporting and analytics can provide your organization with detailed, point-in-time analysis to give critical insights for making business decisions. Many software solutions can also offer for you integrations with other third-party solutions so that you can seamlessly connect your two systems for maximum efficacy.

So those are just some of the many benefits as to why you might want to implement an entity management software. So with that, David is taking us back into kind of a bit more of a focus on CSC and our Entity Management system. David.

David: Excellent. Thanks, Andrea. Yeah. So we're going to talk at a high level about our platform, what makes it different, and then talk about some of the new features. And then really I'm just excited to see the demonstration, which Andrea does such a fantastic job of.

So again, when we talk about entity management software, really, you know, what does make our solution different than maybe some of the other offerings in the market?

And I think the first bullet is one that we really can't stress enough, and that's the fact that our technology, that you'll see in just a bit, is completely integrated with what we offer as a compliance partner. So if you're using us here in the U.S. as a registered agent, we talked about that being sort of a hallmark service for CSC, or if you're also maybe using us outside of the U.S. for our global corporate secretarial service, where we're acting as a compliance partner for non-U.S. entities, in either those scenarios, anytime CSC does a filing on your behalf, the associated data elements from that filing are automatically updated in your CSC Entity Management account as well as the documents that are created as a consequence of those filings. We often refer to that as the evidence of the filing.

So what becomes really powerful for our customers is the fact that this is not a standalone database, where they are left on their own so to speak, to make every single data update and every document update in the platform. But it's really quite the opposite, where there's the synergy between all of the information that we're managing for them as a filing and compliance partner being updated in real time in the database, and then they find themselves in a position to build on top of that by creating org charts and doing a number of really powerful capabilities that you'll start to see a bit in the demo.

The second bullet point I think is actually really important as well, where we're talking about it being a very intuitive solution. And so we are routinely making upgrades. We're going to kind of talk a little bit about what that cadence looks like and highlight some of the most recent upgrades in the platform. But the short story here is that we are constantly developing new capabilities in the system. But sort of our guiding North Star, when we're doing development, is that these features have to be easy to use so that people can adopt them not just for power users but also for, you know, other folks in the system that may use the system a little bit more casually.

And it reminded me actually of a quote from Steve Jobs, which I'll paraphrase a little bit. He says that's been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder to build than complex. You have to work to get your thinking clean and make it simple, but it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. So again, we work again very hard to make our features easy to use within the technology.

I think there was a question that came through the Q&A about, you know, cybersecurity, and you'll see that that's mentioned here on the third bullet. So we go to incredible lengths to make sure that the information, the data and documents that our clients maintain on our platform are incredibly secure. And so we can provide documentation around annual security assessments that we go through. It's what's known as a SOC 2 Type 2 audit. We can also provide details around the world-class data centers that host our technology. We can talk about things like encryption and firewalls. The short story there is that, again, there's a tremendous investment in making sure that this information is, again, secure, protected, and out of the hands of bad actors.

I think another thing you'll see on the next bullet that makes us a bit different than some of the competitors in the space is that we have a very inclusive, what I might call all you can eat model, where when you subscribe to our technology, we're not charging you for users, we're not charging you for enhancements, we're not charging you for training, nor are we charging you for components of the technology. There are some competitors where, depending on what features you're interested in, you might have to pay more. Depending on the package you're on, you may or may not get some new capabilities. With our technology, it's very simple to understand your total cost of ownership. You've got a flat annual fee, and all the features, including new upgrades, are part of that subscription. And then, again, we talk about the fact that we have a very robust commitment to developing new capabilities in the platform.

So this slide, I think we're boasting a little bit on this slide, but I think that's okay. So this slide talks about some of the recognitions that we've received over the years. The first one is the "New York Law Journal," where they do an annual reader survey, and for 11 years in a row we've been voted as one of the top entity management platforms.

The second recognition is a bit more recent, which is really exciting. So I think a lot of folks on this call are likely familiar with the CLOC organization, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. They did a state of the industry report, along with the ACC, the Association of Corporate Counsel, and they interviewed 200 organizations that represented 22 industries across 21 different countries, and of those 200 companies that were part of the survey, 48 of them were Fortune 500 organizations. And they asked them really simple questions. Are using technology for eSignatures, and if so, who are you using? Do you have an ELM system, and if so, who are you using? And when they asked about corporate governance and entity management, we're incredibly proud to say that CSC was the most cited provider in that space amongst that state of the industry survey.

And then more recently, just this year, the "National Law Journal" selected CSC Entity Management as a legal technology trailblazer, and really what I think led to that recognition is that integration, that I talked about before, between the technology and the services and bringing those things together for our customers.

So with that, this is a slide that has a lot of information. It's a bit of a visual timeline of a number of the enhancements that we've made in the platform over the past four to five years. I would say typically there are three to four significant or major upgrades that we launch in the technology on a yearly basis. And again, I don't want to sit here and spend 10 minutes talking about all these things. I think it's more exciting to see it in action. So I'll just sort of briefly mention a few things sort of from the middle to the right.

So drag and drop for documents is an upgrade that makes it incredibly simple to upload documents into our platform, which folks can do in an unlimited fashion. We've launched enhanced security around documents so that you have an incredible degree of control over which users in your organization can or cannot see the documents that you manage in the technology.

And then really kind of jumping forward a little bit, the last three are the ones that have launched in the last nine months. So within the last year, not even a full year, we're going to see some of the org chart enhancements. We want to talk about some of the additional customization features that we've launched around directors and officers, and then we want to talk about our really exciting new upgrade, which is our DocuSign integration.

But as you look through this slide, you're going to see things that talk about custom fields and customization, and that's really kind of a recurring theme within the technology, which I think also, kind of going back a few slides, is something else that makes this unique, which is that we provide tools to our customers to allow them to configure the application in ways that it is meaningful and helpful for them to gain those efficiencies. So whether it's customizing the data, org charts, reports, calendar events, officer director appointment tracking, we really go above and beyond to make sure that the system can really be modified in such a way that it's unique to your organization and meaningful for your organization.

So with that, I do want to now kind of dive into some of the most recent enhancements, again within the last year, and if memory serves, really within the last nine months that we've gone live with in our technology.

The latest and greatest feature is our partnership with DocuSign. This went live just a month ago. And so for organizations that are using DocuSign as their eSignature tool, effectively what they're able to do is unlock that capability within CSC Entity Management.

So if you have documents that require a signature, like let's say consents or resolutions, while you're working within our Entity Management technology, you can very easily define who the signer should be, push those documents out for signature, collect the signatures, have a mechanism to sort of track the status of those signature signing events. And then also very notably we envisioned that once you've got a fully signed or what folks might call a fully executed document, you would say, well, now what I want to do is I want to store this document within one of my minute book folders within the CSC Entity Management technology. So really this is meant to be sort of a complete kind of life cycle of that document, again pushing it out, defining signers, collecting, and then permanently storing a copy of that document within the technology, something that Andrea will walk us through in just a little bit.

Also another exciting upgrade that we did, this was towards the tail end of last year, is what we describe as officer and director appointment custom fields. So I think Andrea did a really nice job of talking about office and directors earlier in the webinar, where we use that terminology really kind of for shorthand, because the section of the platform that we're referring to can go well beyond directors and officers, right? You can track members, managers, partners, powers of attorney, committee members, any capacities that are meaningful for you to track within the technology.

And so this is interesting because I had a conversation with a prospective client just last week, where at the beginning of our dialogue she mentioned that not only does she have powers of attorney that she needs to track for her entities, but it's really critical that she have a mechanism to be able to track really what that POA allows them to do or not do. And so the upgrade that we're referencing here is really designed for that type of specificity, where not only can you track the person's title, but you can capture unique information about the title at the appointment level, so an appointment equating to a person plus a title plus an entity. So, for example, you might have someone that is a POA on multiple entities, but maybe their authority varies from one to the other. So you're seeing some examples of what those custom fields could look like. So we're very excited about that flexibility.

And then really the last sort of most recent major upgrade that we'll talk about, which we're still excited about, we're still getting great feedback from our customers, is the org chart capabilities. So the org chart functionality has been available in our technology for many, many years, but last year, in the July time frame, we made a significant enhancement to adding more sort of flexibility, power, and customization into this part of our technology.

And so one of the challenges that we've heard from customers over the years, especially those that have larger org charts, is that sometimes they can be just a bit unwieldy given their sheer size. And so the enhancement that we launched last year allows for a number of customization capabilities, which includes the ability to purposely break the org chart down into smaller sections through a capability that we call Chartfolio.

We also introduced what we refer to as a live preview. So actually, as you go through the workflow to assemble the chart, which these are dynamically built based on the ownership records that you maintain in the technology, in real time you can see the chart rendering, including fields that you wish to show, and modifying shapes and colors based on formatting rules that you can define, and then also making it easier to export the org chart directly into Visio for clients that may look to do sort of further customization of the chart itself.

And so, again, just sort of highlighting briefly some of the more recent enhancements that we've made in the technology.