Key Considerations When Selecting an Entity Management System

Disclaimer: Please be advised that this recorded webinar has been edited from its original format, which may have included a product demo and other engagement features. To set up a live demo, please complete the form above on our website. If you currently are not on our website and are watching this on our YouTube channel, there's a link to the website in the description of this video. Thank you.

Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Key Considerations When Selecting an Entity Management System." My name is Annie Triboletti. I will be your moderator kicking things off today.

So joining us today are Andrea Jonaitis and David Jefferis. Andrea is one of our expert sales engineers specializing in entity management, and David is a senior director of product management, also specializing in entity management. So with that, I'd like to welcome in Andrea and David.

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

David: Thank you again for being a part of today's webinar. We're excited for all the content that we have to take you through. And I was going to say during the presentation, don't hesitate to hit us up in the Q&A. And I see Peggy has already asked a great question, and yes, we will look at our org chart modeling capability as a part of our demo. Probably a little bit towards the second half, but we will absolutely get there. So keep the Q&A coming.

So I wanted to start just by taking us through today's agenda to give you a feel for what we'll cover in today's webinar, and then we'll dive right in. So we do recognize that there are a lot of folks that registered for our session today that currently do use CSC in some capacity for at least one of our services. That said, I think there are some folks here that might not be working with CSC. And so we want to spend a slide, a moment to talk about CSC as an organization.

Then we'll start to shift into really the heart of the presentation, which is talking about entity management, which is a term that can mean different things to different people. Sometimes people say, "I'm interested in entity management," and what they're really talking about is compliance services, maybe for their domestic and/or global entities. In this case, spoiler alert, I don't want to take away from Andrea's slides, but we're going to be really talking about software, purpose-built software for managing legal entities.

So we'll talk about kind of what these programs typically can do or platforms can do. We'll talk about some of the challenges of not having a system in place or a sort of modern system in place. And then we will spend probably the second part of the presentation really getting into the capabilities that CSC brings to the market with a platform that we call CSC Entity Management, with a live demonstration. And then Q&A at the end. But again, as I mentioned, please feel free to submit questions throughout, and we'll do our absolute best to answer those questions as they come.

So without further ado, I'm going to turn things over to Andrea, and she's going to get us started.

Andrea: Sounds good. Thanks, David. So we wanted to quickly kick off with just a little bit about CSC as an organization. Here is some high-level information about us. You may already be familiar, but if you are not yet familiar with CSC, we are globally headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware. We have a physical presence on five continents around the world.

We're a privately held organization, dating back to 1899, and we have quite a few customers that we have amassed over the years. We are very proud to serve over 90% of the Fortune 500. They are utilizing CSC for at least one of our services. We provide a wide array of services across many different areas. Over 20% of the Fortune 500 utilize CSC Entity Management as their portfolio management solution. And we've been in the space for a fairly long time, over 130 years of experience in U.S. and global markets.

We also effectively doubled the size of our team and added decades more experience all around the world through the acquisition of the Intertrust Group about four or five years ago now. This was a very strategic expansion and acquisition for CSC. It allowed us to expand the depth and breadth of our already extensive service offerings around the world.

So you may be already familiar with CSC for a variety of reasons and across many of our services and technologies. But with that said, we're going to focus in on entity management, entity management kind of as a whole, not specifically as it relates to CSC. And then we'll talk more about how CSC Entity Management kind of works and what sets us aside.

But first, we want to quickly talk about kind of summarizing the definition of entity management software, just to make sure we're on the same page. Sometimes we might have different ideas of things that we're looking to address with an entity management software. Our definition really specifically is relating to specialized software, making your portfolio management more streamlined and centralized, and serving as your main source of truth for things like managing entity data and details, tracking ownership records, and being able to build graphic or text-based org charts.

Being able to track appointments, whether that's officers and directors or if it's other types of appointments, like members, managers, partners, powers of attorney, maybe committee members, custom roles and titles, anything that could be important for you. Just appointment management in general. Being able to manage electronic minute books and documents, or perhaps even generating those documents from inside of your entity management solution. Of course, the analytics around your portfolio maintenance, being able to generate reports, being able to receive alerts and reminders for your events and deadlines, and having that transparency that's necessary around compliance events.

So those are specifically the items that we're referring to. You might also have other systems or maybe leverage an entity management solution for other types of details. But those are the ones specifically that we're going to be referring to today.

So why implement an entity management software? I'm not sure if I need to convince anybody on this call as to why you might leverage this type of technology, but you probably are already well aware that the compliance landscape is evolving rapidly. It has changed so much over the last few years. Entity management software is becoming more and more important to help make things easier and better and faster and just to kind of assist with freeing you up to take care of other things.

Research is showing that this discipline of entity management is kind of growing. More and more companies seem to be moving away from manual processes in favor of adopting a more formal technology or an entity management software platform. These types of software solutions can help you to keep up and make the maintenance of your portfolio easier. It's very difficult to keep up with changing regulatory requirements, especially if you have a multinational portfolio. Entity management software can help you avoid the pitfalls and the unnecessary risks of the things that might come with the maintenance of your portfolio. So being able to manage your deadlines, your various international, state, county, local filing requirements, and so forth, it's going to really streamline and simplify that.

Your more advanced solutions are going to go beyond just a repository. They'll offer things like flexible configurability, being able to really tailor the database to meet your organization's needs, even if it's departmental specific. So tax needs different functionality or tracking versus legal versus accounting. Being able to support workflow automation, having that ability to again kind of assist or automate those types of processes that could be important for you. Robust reporting and analytics, being able to have point-in-time analysis or having critical insights for business decisions.

Software solutions can often integrate with third-party applications, allowing you to seamlessly connect those two systems together. And AI-powered features really critical. AI is becoming a hot topic right now, not just as it relates to entity management, but just in the compliance industry in general. So you're going to want to consider an entity management solution that can provide you with some AI-powered features.

So the next area for us to talk about is just to talk about some of the top considerations for selecting an entity management system. You may already have some considerations that are very important for you as you are considering an entity management solution for yourself, or maybe some pain points that you're looking to address. These are some of the considerations that we think are pretty important.

So the first consideration that we have to talk about is the importance of automation as it relates to entity management and your portfolio maintenance. [audio cuts out 00:08:18] and this as it relates to this entity management discipline and as it relates to entity management software. First we've got the human element, so service as it relates to entity management. There are abilities for a pairing of service and technology. CSC, again as an example, we can automate the flow and capture of data and documents. Having that type of one-stop shop in your software is important, but even better if someone else can manage or maintain that for you. So that way it can kind of free your team up for managing the other aspects of your business that need more of your time and attention. So being able to have data and documents flowing automatically into your software solution is incredibly powerful and again just gives you that bandwidth that you might need for other things.

Next we have workflow automation, which I started to talk about a little bit. Being able to track and manage workflow items that could be important or kind of take care of processes or projects. Things like generating documents, having a workflow for building or designing or creating documents, being able to obtain electronic signatures, entity management solutions could do that for you. Maybe an automation as it relates to calendaring deadlines or tracking and managing those deadlines and compliance obligations, or receiving alerts and reminders around those. Being able to complete and submit filings through the system, or assist with task management or project management type workflows.

We also started to talk about AI a little bit and how critical AI is becoming in the space, and efficiencies from AI are more and more prevalent in entity management solutions. We're going to show you some of the new things that CSC has as it relates to AI. We can also talk about some areas that we're moving to in the future with AI enhancements. Things that you might be able to lean on an entity management solution to do as it relates to AI would be things like maybe asking AI to translate documents for you, being able to have those translated into a native language, or being able to ask AI questions like where is someone an appointed officer or director, or which entities are located in Germany, or things like that. Being able to have AI bring those answers to you or efficiently answer them versus taking the time to look those things up inside of your software solution. It could be things like mapping data into the system. So uploading a document and maybe having data fields mapped into the tool through AI automation. Or we'll show you the way that you can use AI to bulk upload documents within CSC's system. So there are a lot of opportunities even beyond those that I've just mentioned, where AI can make things easier for you.

Also getting into integrations, I started to talk about that briefly, but that's also crucial for automation because you might already be maintaining other types of systems outside of your entity management platform, things like tax or accounting or other types of databases. And why duplicate data inside of your entity management solution if you could easily just connect those two systems together and have that information shared back and forth between those systems?

So in a simple example, you have an SAP system. You want to be able to pull in SAP code into entity management from that tool. Or maybe you're using Yardi, or you have some other type of accounting software that maybe you're populating information that would be valuable to share with entity management. Or vice versa, data coming from your entity management solution into those other technologies. It really can help you to avoid having to maintain or duplicate information across those separate systems. So efficiencies can be gained by way of that level of automation as well.

I think I have talked about automation maybe too much. I could spend the rest of the webinar talking about automation. So let's get into another topic for consideration. That would be configurability.

So entity management software that's configurable does give you the ability to really tailor the system based on your organization's needs. There's really not a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to an entity management platform. There are going to be things that you need to track. Or even in your own organization different departments might have different things that are needed, different functionalities, different custom fields that you need to track. What tax and accounting is managing might be separate and apart from what legal needs to track or report upon or what maybe auditors need to have access to inside of that type of a system. So being able to really configure that. And then, again, as you get into a multinational portfolio, things start getting even more vastly different because requirements from different jurisdictions globally start to vary, different data that needs to be tracked or reported starts to get different. So again, having that level of configurability is crucial.

Also it could be that maybe the data that you track today could be different than what you need to track tomorrow and in the future. So having a type of system that can grow and evolve as your portfolio needs change, it's pretty powerful to be able to make enhancements, change your mind, track different things based on the needs of your business. So making sure that you have that scalable architecture that can really allow you that personalization.

The last item for me to get into is security. Security is always paramount. I don't think I need to convince anybody on this call how important security is. Whether you're using entity management software as a standalone solution, or if you've paired it with some other types of services, whether it's like registered agent services, maybe global corporate secretarial services or annual reports, you're going to want to make sure that you have data security and privacy and protections in place.

Our approach to security is pretty multifaceted. So there's protection against bad actors, people that shouldn't be accessing the tool and you want to absolutely keep out of the system. There's also security within the people that you would like to give access to the tool. So being able to appropriately restrict those folks, giving them the access and roles that they need through role-based permissions, but kind of locking down or restricting the areas that really aren't crucial to their purposes or that they don't need to have visibility into. There's also security within the service professionals that might be assisting you with services or portfolio maintenance. So you want to make sure that any solution or kind of complete partnership or solution that you have in place is going to be able to address and honor your needs across those multi-prong security situations.

It's imperative to discuss those security mechanisms and protections that are in place, both on the service side and the technology side. So on the tech side and even service, you might look for a solution that has a SOC certification, maybe penetration tests or audited regularly. Business continuity and disaster recovery procedures and processes, those should be very transparent and made available to you as a consumer.

So let me turn the microphone over to David to talk about some of the other top considerations that you might make when you are selecting an entity management solution.

David: Absolutely. And so the next one that we'll talk about is what we're calling a roadmap. Essentially, and Andrea touched on this a little bit, about the fact that the data that you're tracking tomorrow might look a little bit different than the data that you're tracking today.

So fundamentally, as you are evaluating a provider's entity management solution, I think it would be incumbent upon you to say, "What have you built lately? What have you done for me lately? What have you rolled out in terms of new capabilities in your platform in the last, say, three to five years? And then also at the same time, what features are being developed as we speak? What does your kind of at least one- to two-year roadmap look like in terms of capabilities that you intend to build?" Because fundamentally, we're in a time right now where technology is evolving at a very rapid pace, and so what's good enough today is not going to be good enough tomorrow to be quite frank. So again, looking for a provider that has that proven track record of investment in functions or functionality and features and kind of a continual improvement in terms of features. Also, it's helpful to understand, and we'll talk about this. I'm sort of foreshadowing my next consideration. But do I get these new features, or am I paying more for new features? We'll talk about that in a split second.

But then also this concept of a partnership. What voice would you have in terms of helping to kind of shape that roadmap? Is the vendor open to those types of conversations to understand your needs and collaborate and partner? Or is it a little bit of you're just sort of in the dark in terms of what might be coming down the pike in terms of capabilities and not maybe even in a position to kind of have a voice in that roadmap? So I think, again, that's something that's definitely worth understanding is, okay, it's great to understand where this platform is now, but where is it moving as we get into the future.

And then the fifth and final consideration, we probably could have come up with more than five, but we wanted to try to distill it down into the ones that we thought were most critical, would be what we're calling value. So all this is well and good, but fundamentally, what does this thing cost, and do I really understand all of the costs? So are there fees beyond an annual subscription? Are you charging for things like what some vendors call seat licenses, where maybe I get a certain number of users, but then if I need more users, it becomes more expensive? What about training and support? Is that limited, and then I start incurring fees for additional training? So these are all questions worth asking so that you can really understand what I think of as sort of the total cost of ownership. What does this thing really cost?

And so we know that there's been a really long-standing and pervasive trend where corporate legal departments have been asked to do more with less, and there are only so many ways to do that. Partnering with providers for services and technology is certainly a key way to do that. But obviously, from a budget standpoint because you'll need a budget for this type of software, it's really helpful to understand it's almost like the roadmap. What does it cost now, but is this thing going to become more expensive over time, and what are the drivers maybe of these fees increasing for the software? So it's really worth having those conversations upfront to really understand what that looks like.

And so, again, so many different considerations to think about, but we wanted to put these kind of front and center as you start to think about maybe adopting an entity management platform for your organization, whether that's for the first time, or maybe you are looking to transition away from a platform that isn't maybe working for you optimally now and looking at a different platform to kind of take your entity governance practice to the next level.

So with that, we're now going to kind of shift gears in the webinar and talk more about CSC's platform. So CSC has an award-winning platform that we call CSC Entity Management. Proud to say that over 20% of the Fortune 500 utilize the solution, which is not to say that this is just software that's needed by large multinational organizations. Certainly smaller organizations with a relatively more modest entity footprint, with maybe just a dozen or a few dozen entities certainly can benefit from this type of software.

What I also want to mention, because this question came in through the chat and I wanted to address it for the broader audience, there are, again, a lot of folks that are on the call today that currently do use CSC as a registered agent. And so in that capacity, there's a fair amount of information that we have on file in a platform that we call CSCNavigator, which you have complementary access to. So today you could log in and see the names of the entities that we act as an agent for, where they're formed, where they're additionally qualified if they're qualified in additional jurisdictions, the dates of formation, the dates of qualification, charter IDs, jurisdictional statuses, entity statuses. There's quite a bit of sort of core foundational information that's available for you to view.

Also, as you potentially engage CSC for filings, like doing a name change, a DBA registration, a qualification, a withdrawal, a dissolution, kind of on through the life cycle, CSC would then automatically update the data elements related to those filings, and the supporting documentation, which we often call the evidence of the filing, is then automatically tied to that company as well. And then we also have what we call our Compliance Calendar that is going to automate when there are annual filings due, like annual reports as a primary example, that would ultimately impact the good standing status of your companies. And that's an automated feature within the technology platform.

So again, just by virtue of having CSC in that capacity as registered agent, there is quite a bit of critical entity data, documents, and compliance visibility that you have through a platform that we call CSCNavigator. With all that said, we have a lot of organizations that want to go beyond those basics. They say, "Well, this is great. But I want to also track directors and officers. I want to be able to track ownership records and build structure charts. I want to be able to upload my own minute books and documents. I want to be able to track custom data and build my own reports, and I want to be able to generate documents and kind of on down the line."

So we're very mindful to communicate the fact that our entity solution is a purpose-built platform. It's more than just a collection of sort of features or a scattered collection of features. That said, I think it's also helpful to kind of understand, well, what capabilities are unlocked if I were to subscribe to CSC Entity Management? And this slide does a pretty good job of summarizing some of the main capabilities in the platform. And I've touched on a few of them. And again, Andrea and I are excited to kind of do a joint demo, in just a little bit, where we walk you through some of the newer features, including some document management capabilities, AI, and some of the org charting features, along with the org chart modeling that we had a request for.

So one other quick thing that I'll mention before I go on to the next slide is that we also offer quite a bit in the way of integrations. This is something that Andrea had talked about, where maybe you want to push data from our system into a tax platform or an accounting platform or have data pushed into CSC Entity Management. And so those types of integrations are certainly possible. So we understand that Entity Management can be your source of truth for your legal entity information. But you likely have a different system that's the source of truth for tax and accounting and finance, etc., etc. So let's have these systems talk to one another.

So there's the ability to set up these I'll call them custom integrations, and then we also have off-the-shelf integrations as well. So we have an integration with Docusign for electronic signatures. We have a pre-built integration with Workday for organizations that are using Workday as your HR or human capital management system. So it can create some in-app and email alerts if there are changes to employees that could stand to impact your officer and director records. We have an integration with Companies House for filing annual confirmation statements. If you have UK entities, that's an annual obligation. And for publicly traded companies that have Section 16 obligations, we do have an integrated Section 16 filer for Forms 3, 4, and 5. So both off-the-shelf integrations, like pre-built and ready to go, but also the ability to design custom integrations as well.

So one of the questions that we get on occasion is, "Well, how is CSC Entity Management different than maybe some of the other entity software programs that are on the market?" I think the first two bullets are maybe the most critical of all, which is that our platform is not just a standalone piece of technology. And there are certainly platforms on the market that really function in that fashion, where the onus is really on you to get every single piece of information into the system. You've got to update all the data, all the documents. You have to even create your own sort of compliance events.

We are really the opposite of that, and so our Entity Management solution is completely integrated with the services that we offer as a registered agent and also as a global provider of corporate secretarial services. So entities flowing into the system, documents flowing in from transactions and filings, calendar events being updated dynamically by virtue of intelligence in the system. And so it's not some sort of blank slate where you've got to capture everything. Instead, you've got this clean, vetted set of data that updates dynamically when you're partnering with CSC, and you can easily build on top of that.

Also, the intuitive nature of the platform I think is really important. It's sort of almost like a North Star in terms of when we're designing new capabilities and we have a slide coming up. It might be the next slide that talks about kind of what we've done from a roadmap perspective. We're always challenging ourselves to make sure that we are sort of putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer and making sure that the feature is fundamentally simple to use. And so we pride ourselves on building a platform that is easy not only for power users that are in there day in day out using it for everything that it's capable of doing, but also more casual users that might only log in every once in a while and maybe they need to understand who the signers are for a particular company, or need to pull a document, or locate a tax ID, or figure out where a particular entity is registered to do business.

And so where these types of software programs can really start to create value for an organization is not just being that source of truth for the legal department, which is typically the folks who kind of own the maintenance and management of the platform, but really creating this like self-service culture, where you can kind of open it up securely to other stakeholders within your organization, where instead of them having to come to you in legal, I presume I'm talking to a lot of folks that are in legal departments today, and asking you all these sort of questions over and over, essentially you can give them secure, limited, read-only access, let them log in, and let them get the answers very easily themselves by virtue of the structured, intuitive way that the information is organized within the platform.

Andrea talked about security. It is absolutely paramount. And so if we can't keep this information secure and private, it's worthless at the end of the day. And so we're proud to say that we service some of the largest financial institutions in the world. And so they put us through very stringent security audits, and we go through hundreds, if not thousands of security audits from clients in a given year. So we are happy to have those in-depth conversations because we understand the critical nature of keeping clients' information secure and private. And now that we're in the world of AI, those concerns are even more sort of front and center, where organizations are wanting to understand how they can leverage AI, but again keep their information secure, safe, and private.

And then the last point, which I think is also really critical, is really just sort of how we bring our application to market. And so when organizations subscribe to CSC Entity Management, there is an annual subscription fee, but it really unlocks everything. So it includes unlimited users, unlimited data and document storage, unlimited training, unlimited ongoing support. It includes all the features. It includes all the upgrades. And this serves to be a bit of a distinguishing capability versus some of our key competitors in the entity management software space. It's not uncommon for some vendors to charge for users, where maybe you're getting so many users for free, but then there are these seat license costs if you go beyond that. You might get a certain amount of training, but then you run into a situation where you're going to be charged for additional training, which can be frustrating. You also might run into situations where, depending on the package or version of the software that you're on, maybe you don't have all the features, maybe you're not getting all the upgrades. And so, again, getting back to that value and total cost of ownership, I think it's important to understand what does this thing really cost when you start to factor in kind of all the ways that you might utilize the application.