Innovations in CSC Entity Management

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Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Innovations in CSC Entity Management." My name is Annie Triboletti, and I will be your moderator for today.

So joining us today are two of CSC's Entity Management experts, David Jefferis and Andrea Jonaitis. David is a senior director of product management, and Andrea is a product manager. So with that, I'd like to welcome David and Andrea.

Andrea: Hi, everyone. Good morning or good afternoon wherever you're joining us from.

David: Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us. We're really excited for our webinar, and we have a lot of great content that we want to cover. So without further ado, we're going to jump in now.

We'll start with the agenda, and so we're going to talk for a moment about CSC as an organization. We recognize a lot of the names of folks that are joining, but certainly there are some folks that are joining us today that may not currently do business with CSC. So we'll spend a moment to talk about CSC as a company. Andrea will take us through some of the sort of definitions. What do we mean when we're talking about entity management software? What are the types of features that we normally see in these types of tools? What sort of challenges do they help organizations overcome?

And then, really, we're going to shift pretty quickly into covering some of the more recent enhancements within the CSC Entity Management solution. That's our entity management software platform. We'll talk a bit about our roadmap. And then even though it's sort of to towards the bottom of the agenda, really the bulk of this presentation, in fact, is a live demonstration of our award-winning solution, where we're going to try to focus on some of the latest and greatest capabilities.

And then Q&A at the end. Although I would say that Annie mentioned there's the Q&A widget. Please feel free to ask questions throughout. Andrea and I are pretty adept at answering questions while someone else is speaking. So we'll look to do as much of that as we possibly can during the webinar and then try to make sure we have a little bit of time on the backend to cover some additional Q&A.

So I'll take a moment to talk about CSC as an organization. So there's a lot of sort of words on this slide, but I'll maybe provide a couple quick facts about CSC as a company. We're a global organization headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware. We have a physical presence on five continents. We're privately held. Our roots go all the way back to 1899. So we're really excited to be celebrating our 125th anniversary this year.

We're also proud to say that over 90% of the Fortune 500 utilize CSC for at least one of our services. As it specifically relates to the CSC Entity Management platform that we'll explore in detail today, we're also proud to say that over 20% of the Fortune 500 utilize CSC Entity Management.

Talking about anniversaries, we're coming up on the two-year anniversary of our acquisition of the Intertrust Group, which has really dramatically expanded the size of our company, practically doubled the size of our organization. And so effectively we are a global organization able to do business wherever our clients are doing business around the globe.

So that's a little bit about CSC. So with that as a backdrop, I'm going to turn things over to Andrea to bring her into the conversation to talk a little bit about definitions and challenges and kind of lay the foundation for what we'll cover in more detail today.

Andrea: Great. I won't spend too much time with this section, but we just wanted to make sure everyone is on the same page when we're talking about the definition of entity management software and why it's useful. Entity management software is a specialized software tool that is designed to make really the maintenance of your entity portfolio more streamlined and centralized. So it serves as your main source of truth for managing entity data, tracking ownership records, and generating graphic or text-based org charts from the system, being able to track appointment details, officers, directors, really any other type of capacity that you might want to track or report on, maybe beneficial ownership or CTA filing requirements there. You can manage your documents inside of the system, both managing and perhaps even building or designing or generating documents. You can most critically track your deadlines, receive alerts and reminders, and have that kind of streamlined through the platform as well.

So with all of those features, it probably goes without saying why someone would implement such a technology. The compliance landscape is evolving rapidly. Things are changing so much even just in the last few years. We're still kind of trying to address the CTA requirements, FinCEN's new CTA filing requirements that have added some additional layers of complexity as companies look for better and more efficient ways of identifying reporting companies, who their beneficial owners are, compiling or getting that data or documentation together that's needed for CTA, as well as just the general portfolio maintenance, annual reports, your compliance requirements.

Entity management software can help to avoid pitfalls and unnecessary risks as your organization navigates through all of the various international, state, county, and local filing requirements. And it varies so much by jurisdiction, especially when you start, again, getting into that global portfolio maintenance. So this technology will help you to streamline. It will provide a collaborative environment.

Even more advanced solutions can do more than just provide repository for data and documents. The best solutions are going to be highly configurable. They'll provide robust tracking and reporting that's very specific to your organization's needs, perhaps even workflow automation, streamlining processes for filings, managing entity life cycle events, enabling transparency throughout your entire process. So again, all of that is going to really come to be available to you with the entity management systems.

David: But before we get to the demo, you can tell me I'm excited to get to the demo, I wanted to spend a moment to talk a bit about CSC Entity Management. So Andrea was sort of laying that foundation about what are these types of platforms, what can they typically do. And really, this is kind of more of a takeaway slide because we'll start to show you a lot of this. But it's a very feature-rich solution. So tracking director and officer appointments, building graphical structure charts of ownership. Being able to create documents, get them signed, store, manage, and search for documents. Track compliance obligations. Custom data. There's really powerful reporting.

We have really powerful integration capabilities. So we have some integrations available off the shelf, for example our integration with Docusign for electronic signatures. We have an integration off the shelf with Workday if you happen to use that as your human capital management HR System to provide alerts when there could be changes that might impact your director and officer records.

So again, a lot of capabilities, very user friendly. And then the first sort of sentence here, and we we're going to hit this a couple of times, is that one of the strengths of this solution is that it's not a standalone technology. Critically it's integrated in with the services that we offer as a compliance partner. So if you're using CSC for registered agent for example, using us maybe internationally for corporate secretarial sort of filings and responsibilities, then there's information and documents that flow automatically into this technology platform. But the reason that organizations subscribe to CSC Entity Management is they want to build on top of that core information. So these are some of the value-added features that come along with a subscription to CSC Entity Management.

One of the questions that we get on occasion, which is a question that's more than fair, is, "How are you different than some of the other solutions that are there on the market?" And so again, not to beat it into the ground too much, but again we really feel that this complete integration between our service and our technology is a hallmark. It's a calling card. It's something that has really distinguished us in the market for many, many years.

Also the platform is very intuitive, and that's not just us saying it. It's something that we continually hear from our clients. And so certainly if you're in the system day in and day out, you get familiarity and you're going to find that it becomes easy to use. But it's also easy for folks that are in the system more sort of intermittently, where maybe they only log in every so often because they have to find a document or locate a list of signers or find a data element or a piece of information about a company. So we've really, as a guiding North Star so to speak, made sure that as we develop more capabilities, that the system still is easy to use and navigate for people that aren't in there day in and day out so to speak.

A couple of other things that are unique are kind of how we take the application to market. So there is, as I believe I mentioned, a subscription fee to have access to these capabilities, but it unlocks the full suite of features within CSC Entity Management. You're not limited as far as the number of users are concerned. Those are unlimited for your subscription. You're getting all the system features when we do upgrades, which typically it's about three to four per year. You're automatically getting those new capabilities. We're not charging you for training or any sort of ongoing support so to speak within the technology platform. So it's very easy to understand what's sort of like the total cost of ownership when I subscribe to the platform. It's kind of this "all you can eat" model in terms of the capabilities and the support report around the technology.

The last bullet point talks about the roadmap. And then sort of seeing is believing, this slide, which, again, is going to be more of a takeaway slide. I don't plan to narrate every item on here. But this is a look at the enhancements that we've launched in the platform over the past five to six years. Again, on average, we have about three to four major upgrades per year. But in the last two years, I think it's been more like a dozen upgrades. We've been very vigilant and very busy developing new capabilities in the platform.

If I had to try to boil this down a little bit, there's lots of internationalization efforts in terms of making the system more internationally capable. We have efforts around making the system more granular in terms of configuration and security. More integrations, again pre-built integrations with Docusign and Workday as a couple of examples.

And so the latest feature, which we promise to show you, is the bulk import. That's listed as number 18 there. That's, again, a feature that went live as of Monday morning. Now again, if CSC is your agent or global compliance partner, entities are there in the system. But if there's more information that you want to get into the platform, we do offer professional services, where for a fee we can migrate data. But now we're, again, making available client-facing tools where you can very quickly and efficiently in a mass update fashion get data into the platform, which we'll take a look at later on in the demonstration.

So that is the Bulk Import Module, which I've started to allude to. This is the latest and greatest feature within the technology. Now this is something that we're developing in phases. So we're going to iterate and sort of add more and more capabilities to this particular feature.

The features that went live the other day are what we're calling our Phase 1, and it really does two important things. If you have entities that you want to track in the system, but they're not entities where CSC has a compliance relationship, we call these non-CSC entities, where again we're not the agent, we're not doing the CoSec work, you can add them into the system, which you've always been able to do. But historically, you would have to do that kind of one at a time using an action in the system. Now in a bulk fashion as many as a thousand in one shot, you can import them into the application either by keying them in or through a spreadsheet, which is what we'll demonstrate later on.

Also, when you have existing entities in the system, whether they're so-called non-CSC entities, ones that we're not representing, or a so-called CSC entity, where we are a compliance partner for that company, when you have entities that are in the system, you can update entity summary details, whether it's a custom field or a standard field, in a bulk fashion, making it faster than ever, more efficient than ever to get information into the application.

Again, that's our Phase 1 launch that went live this week. But again, we're working as we speak on the next phase, which is to be able to make officer and director updates in bulk. And then we'll look for future phases to come next year as well. So that's a little bit of a preview of what you'll see in the demonstration around what we call our Bulk Import Module.

And now I'm going to, I think, turn things over to Andrea to talk a little bit more about some of our other recent enhancements.

Andrea: That's right. Thanks, David. One of our most recent enhancements, prior to bulk import update capabilities, is our document generation feature. So this just went live just about three months ago. This is CSC's advanced document generation solution providing really an end to-end experience in terms of not just storing documents, which you can do in the system, but now giving the ability to build and design and create those documents. And you can follow a guided workflow to efficiently merge entity data into document templates to really streamline and simplify the process of creating one or many documents all at the same time. So you can manage an unlimited number of configurable templates for your documents, so that you can save the language that you like for the templates or the documents that you use, whether they're consents and resolutions, whether it's minute structures or contracts. Really any type of document can be generated here and, again, following an intuitive workflow that is just going to step-by-step take you through the process.

Data from CSC's Entity Management system can be mapped into those document templates, allowing you to merge simple or complex attributes and information and build dynamic lists of data based on the records that are inside of the platform. Also, once you generate documents from the system, you can action on those documents in a variety of ways. You can edit or download those. You can email them and share them, or circulate for wet signature. You can transfer the documents into the entity filing cabinet.

You can also seamlessly route documents for electronic signature through CSC's pre-built integration with Docusign electronic signature. My apologies. That takes us into the next enhancement that was previous to document generation. It includes the ability to integrate with Docusign as an electronic signature provider. So not only can you use the electronic signature integration to route documents that you generate as part of the document generation workflow that I just spoke about a minute ago, you can actually separately utilize this Docusign integration to send any documents for electronic signature whether they were generated by our Document Generation Module or just originated out outside of the CSC platform.

Again, it's going to provide you with a very intuitive workflow where you're able to pick your documents or upload one or many documents. You can select and add signers. You can route documents for signature. We really strive to bring simplicity to this process and workflow by leveraging other capabilities within CSC Entity Management to simplify this. So first, this electronic signature integration integrates with the filing cabinet. So once the documents are electronically executed and signed, you can click a button and have those route into the right entity folder, whether it's minute books or other documents, and you can choose where to store those documents perpetually, memorializing them.

Second, you can link documents to your entities, and that's going to leverage the officer/director tracking portion of the database, where you can save time if the directors and officers that are in your listing there are the signers for your documents. Rather than having to manually key in their information, you're able to select their records from the entity by way of this integration, and the details are already populated. Then, again, you can just click a button. It routes the documents to those signers. If the signers of your documents are not listed as officers or directors within the database, you still can manually add signers and contact information on the fly. But we can save that time by again tapping into those officer or director records.

The electronic signature integration also links with Docusign's audit records. So you can use the envelope tracking feature to review and manage your signature request statuses. You can click on any signature request. It pulls up a complete list of actions and a log of what has occurred. So it includes when the signers opened or viewed the documents. It's going to show you when they completed or executed the documents. You also can use that audit log to deduce who you need to follow up with because they haven't finished the signing process yet.

So we're going to take a look at those two features during our live demo in just a minute. But let's get into our next feature, which is the merger history workflow. And this time I won't forget that I'm taking this one. So I'll give you one more second to breathe, David.

So the merger history workflow allows our users to capture details of their M&A activity. So you can record surviving entity and domestic jurisdictions. You can record non-surviving entity names and jurisdictions. The system will accommodate the recording of merger filed and effective dates. You also can attach other notes to these transactions. Again, it's a very intuitive, guided workflow that's going to allow you not only to capture the details of these transactions, but to make updates immediately within the Entity Management system. So it will prompt you if you want to expire director and officer appointments or if you want to expire parent level ownership of the non-surviving entities. The entity statuses are automatically updated in this workflow, and you can also easily terminate or reassign any child level entities that were previously owned by any of the non-surviving entities. So again, it provides that end-to-end experience of not just memorializing your M&A activity but prompting you to make the appropriate updates inside of the Entity Management system.

David, apologies. I cut you off there. You had taken that one in the morning because I forgot. But anything that you wanted to add before we roll into the other features of the system?

David: No, that's totally fine. I will actually add one other comment to the Docusign integration only because this question came up a bunch of times in the morning session. So there is a question about pricing really. So ultimately there is a fee, which is an annual fee, to subscribe to CSC Entity Management. That does unlock all the capabilities. So there's no extra fee or additional fee to utilize our eSignature integration. With that said, in order for that feature to really function, you do need to acquire a Docusign license or account. If you have a Docusign license, then effectively you're kind of unlocking that within our solution so that you can use the features that Andrea described. So again, no extra fee, but a Docusign license is ultimately required that you would obtain to really be able to fundamentally use that capability.

So with that out of the way, let's take a look at our last sort of new feature, and then we're going to talk about what's next on the roadmap and then get into the demonstration. So Andrea was talking about the compliance landscape and how it's always changing. And I think the greatest example, which she touched on, is the CTA, right, the Corporate Transparency Act. It went into effect at the beginning of this year.

Very brief primer. If you have entities that were formed prior to this year, if they don't meet any of the 23 exemptions, they are so-called reporting companies and they have until January 1st of next year to submit their initial beneficial ownership information filing. So a lot of folks are getting sort of a little anxious that the clock is ticking and we're sort of losing runway in terms of getting these filings completed for a lot of our entities.

And so, fundamentally, if you're familiar with the Corporate Transparency Act, there's information that's required about the reporting companies themselves, so the legal entity name, domestic jurisdiction or what's often called the jurisdiction of formation, a tax identification number, which is typically an EIN, a principal place of business, any trade names or doing business as names, which are all data elements that you can very easily track within our technology.

And then there's also information required on so-called beneficial owners, individuals that either own 25% or more, or by virtue of appointments exercise what FinCEN, the governing authority here, refers to as substantial control. And so those individuals can ultimately be tracked within the technology. For those beneficial owners, you're obligated to either report their FinCEN ID, which is a unique identifier that those folks can register for and obtain. Or in absence of a FinCEN ID, you need to provide quite a bit of personal information about these folks, including their legal name, their birthday, their current residential address, and then an identification number from a document like a driver's license or a passport number as well as a clearly scanned image of said driver's license or passport. And as it turns out, all of that personal information or the FinCEN ID can be tracked within CSC Entity Management.

So there's already that framework for tracking this information in the solution. And so very late last year, in advance of the CTA going live, we launched this beneficial ownership visualization report. Effectively, it is able to aggregate that information, again data about the reporting companies, data about beneficial owners, and bring it all together and create visualization as well. So it effectively creates like a linear org chart, where you can kind of start with the reporting company and actually look up a hierarchy because in many cases you could have individuals that are not just what would be called direct beneficial owners, where they have direct ownership of a reporting company or a direct appointment that gives them control, sometimes you actually have to kind of look through intermediary companies and kind of work your way up the hierarchy of ownership to find other individuals that in an indirect capacity still meet that FinCEN definition of having substantial control. So this report allows you to basically aggregate and visualize the structures to make those critical determinations as to which folks need to be included in those reports with FinCEN.

Now this is separate, but related. I'll mention that CTA does have a CTA (sic) beneficial ownership filing service. So if you do have this filing obligation and you're not inclined to try to take it on yourself, we do have a team of experts that have been doing this day in and day out since the beginning of the year, where we effectively can again provide clarity around the data that we need and we can prepare and file these FinCEN beneficial ownership reports on your behalf.

With that said, I do want to take a moment to talk a little bit about the roadmap. And so we are always developing new capabilities within the platform, again typically three to four major upgrades per year. So this is just a lens into sort of the most immediate set of capabilities that we're working on. Certainly there are things that will come beyond this as well.

But we're working on what we call inbound API capability. So today, we have an API integration service, where if you have data or documents that live inside of CSC Entity Management, you can feed them into one or multiple we call them downstream applications. So very easy to set up integrations to feed information, again data or documents from our system to other applications. What's getting ready to go live in the first quarter of next year is an inbound capability. So if you have data elements that are sitting in a third-party system, maybe you've got a Yardi code, maybe you've got an SAP code, and instead of having to manually plug that data into CSC and kind of maintain it into two places, let the SAP system or the Yardi system in those two examples be the source of truth for that data and feed it into CSC Entity Management and tie it to the entity record, so that you're not doing that duplicate data maintenance and data entry. So we're very excited for, again, the inbound integration capability to go live in the next couple of months.

Also, we're talking about the bulk import being our latest and greatest feature that went live this week. And as I believe I noted earlier, the next iteration or the next phase of that will be the ability to make mass updates to officer and director information. Now to be clear, we currently have actions in the system where you can globally add and replace and expire individuals. But this will sort of take it to a whole nother level of efficiency with making mass changes to officer and director information.

We are actively gathering requirements to build a pre-built integration with Companies House, which many of you folks may recognize that name. That's the UK business registry. So effectively if you have to file confirmation statements or director changes or PSC registers, etc., we are building an integration that'll be available off the shelf where you'll be able to effectively file those types of documents through CSC, those types of filings through our Entity Management application and not have to work sort of in an offline fashion if you have those UK filing obligations.

And then last, but certainly not least, is org chart enhancements. We've made a significant number of enhancements to our Org Chart Module over the past couple of years, but there's always more that we can be doing in this regard as it is such a popular part of the technology platform. And so specifically what I think we'll see as the first two sort of next things around org charts would be what we call org chart modeling or scenarios, or sometimes people call them future org charts, sort of these what-ifs if we were to, based on our current structure, form a new entity or dissolve an entity, what would it look like and being able to kind of model things out in different scenarios or kind of what-if future type charts. And so that's sort of one of the next two.

The other is what we're calling compact charts. So we have some clients that have an entity with a lot of immediate subs, and it creates a little bit of kind of a horizontal view, and it might not be the most sort of efficient way of viewing the entity. So the idea is let me click a button and make it a little bit more compact, so giving you more controls to kind of control the layout of the way the entities are represented in those structure charts. So that's another enhancement that's kind of on the horizon around org charts.