More Than Checking the Box: A Complete Registered Agent Solution

Disclaimer: Please be advised that this recorded webinar has been edited from its original format which may have included a product demo. To set up a live demo or to request more information, please complete the form to the right. Or if you are currently not on CSC Global, there is a link to the website in the description of this video. Thank you.

Caitlin: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "More than Checking the Box: A Complete Registered Agent Solution." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today is Paul Mathews. Paul is Director of Product Management for Representation Services at CSC. With more than 20 years of experience, Paul is responsible for driving strategic direction of CSC's registered agent and service of process solutions. And with that, I'd like to welcome Paul.

Paul: Thank you very much, Caitlin. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Really happy to be able to run through these materials with you and spend some time talking about what CSC can offer as a service provider.

So just to quickly run through our agenda, in today's session we are going to take a look at the overall registered agent market and the landscape. We will differentiate between a check-the-box registered agent and truly a full-service provider. We will talk about some of the critical functions a registered agent is responsible for and how that looks when your provider truly understands how to service your company fully and help shield you from unnecessary risks. Then we'll wrap things up with a look at CSC's newest addition to our registered agent offering, which is our Compliance Mail tool. And then we'll also carve out some time at the end of the session for questions from the audience. And with that let's get started.

So just a little bit about CSC just to give you some context for who we are as an organization. CSC is celebrating our 125 year anniversary as the partner of choice for companies around the globe. We're trusted to handle everything from incorporating a company through maintaining compliance to corporate transactional work, protecting digital assets from the threats of the online world, and everything in between. We offer the solutions and technology that keep business running in the background, allowing our clients to focus on the important work of growing their business.

CSC and its 8,000 plus employees have a presence on 5 continents and offer expertise and services in more than 140 jurisdictions around the world. We are the partner of choice for more than 90% of the Fortune 500, more than 90% of the 100 Best Global Brands, more than 10,000 law firms, and more than 70% of the largest private equity firms in the world.

We believe that no single provider can offer the depth of experience, the quality of service, and the range of solutions offered by CSC. Today's session will focus on our services specific to how we provide a full-service registered agent solution, but we'll also touch on many of the complementary services and solutions that are needed while managing the full life cycle of corporate entities.

With few exceptions, entities doing business in one or more U.S. jurisdictions are required to register their entity and appoint a registered agent. Let's talk about some of the challenges that face organizations as they go through that process.

So as organizations are first coming into existence or as they start to spread their footprint to multiple entities or across multiple jurisdictions, it can be tempting to think about the selection of a registered agent as almost a transactional choice rather than thinking of it as what it truly is, which is hopefully an ongoing, long-term relationship. If you're not careful during that process, you may find that you've selected someone that thinks of your organization transactionally, and you can also find yourself spread across multiple providers. And what we find is that's almost never going to be to your advantage.

So depending on how large your organization is and how widely you spread your registered agent footprint, you may find yourself taking on more work because of how you've filled this need. A good registered agent solution should reduce your load, and they should also be able to provide insights into your organization and its structure.

So most commercial registered agents will offer some sort of software tools to help with managing your entities and the overall visibility to your entity vitals and other information. So to actually get the benefits of these tools, it doesn't make sense to have different subsets of your critical information split across multiple providers and therefore multiple software solutions or to manage that through spreadsheets and other kind of less centralized data points. So to actually get the benefit of these tools, what we find is that all the value and efficiency of those tools starts when you have a single source of truth and a source of truth that you're comfortable with using and whose content you can trust. So again, having confidence that the information is accurate, up to date, and being maintained and again also in a centralized place. That's really where those tools start to become useful and kind of help you spend only the amount of attention and focus necessary on those tasks and not have it become a full-time job just to kind of wrangle the data.

So most commercial registered agents provide software that's going to help you with that overall visibility. And as you're choosing your provider, you need to understand that it's not just a service provider selection. It's also a technology selection. So the responsibilities of a registered agent relate to a couple of primary things, but those include handling your recurring compliance obligations and also handling time-sensitive legal documents on your behalf. So you want a provider who will deliver that information to you in a timely and dependable way. The methods and the processes of each of your agents may vary. So again, if you're using multiple providers, you may find it very difficult to hold everyone accountable or predict how they're going to handle certain situations. So we find that choosing a single provider and working out a shared understanding of your expectations, that's almost always going to yield the best results for your organization.

And then, finally, if you split your service across multiple providers, one of the things you'll find is that you're watering down any leverage you have to really make sure you're paying consistent and competitive prices for the service. So if you're splitting across multiple providers, you're having to negotiate multiple times, and you're not going to be able to leverage sort of the full size of your portfolio as part of what gets you that most competitive pricing.

So let's talk quickly about another reason that vendor choice is always important, but especially when it comes to critical vendor relationships, like your registered agent. The Association of Corporate Counsel surveyed their membership to determine what they identified as the most critical hurdles that prevent them from achieving their desired business outcomes. In their responses, 62% cited struggling with competing priorities, 49% said that they had a lack of bandwidth, and 37% indicated that inconsistent processes or processes that were not being updated, so stale processes was another major factor in preventing them from achieving their business goals. So as we overlay those hurdles with the process of choosing a registered agent, it seems that the data is pointing towards choosing a service partner that is experienced, capable, and one that will ultimately take work off your plate and bring consistency and quality to your critical entity compliance-related processes.

So we kind of jumped into the deep end, and we're talking about some of the challenges and pain points that hopefully a registered agent can potentially resolve. And we talked about some of the challenges related to spreading out your registered agent selection across multiple providers. We're going to take a step back now and talk about just some of the basics, those check-the-box requirements that any registered agent has to fill.

So just a reminder of what those basic attributes a qualified registered agent has to fulfill include and again I'll just stop and point out that we find it's a little surprising how often customers are using one or more registered agent solutions that fail to meet even these most basic requirements. Sometimes this happens when an entity was spun up outside of your normal processes. Maybe a new product offering or something like that was driving it. Sometimes you'll inherit this through an acquisition or through your predecessor in your current role. But either way, it's important to make sure that you're kind of inspecting your existing relationships to make sure that they meet these needs.

So just to kind of baseline what those needs are, a registered agent is expected to provide a physical legal office address in the states where you're doing business. And then, through that address, your registered agent will be responsible for receiving both service of process, so things like litigation, subpoenas, wage garnishments, and then they'll also be responsible for receiving compliance-related government communications and documents on behalf of your company. So again, even within these most basic requirements, you should care both if and how your current agent or a potential agent meets those obligations.

So having a physical office in a jurisdiction, what that really means is specifically that they have a staffed office during normal business hours and during the work week. So traditionally, this is something that sometimes small businesses kind of roll the dice on and they decide to act as their own agent, not really considering is that actually a part of the obligation they can meet. Sometimes they don't think it's ever going to come up, and as a result of that, they find themselves on the wrong end of a default judgment or they find themselves with less time or less visibility into a potential issue.

We also find more recently that you also need to be talking about or talking to your agent about whether they have any gaps in coverage. So we've seen issues with the shrinking workforce or hybrid work models that suddenly find what used to be sort of a reliable, dependable, there's always going to be somebody in the office situation has turned into, well, there's no one in on Thursday afternoons. But that's not a reasonable answer for a registered agent provider.

One other thing that we're seeing an increase in across some of our competitors is they are using shared and virtual offices to plug some of these gaps. As Caitlin mentioned at the outset in my introduction, she mentioned that I've kind of been working in this space for about 20 years. And I just want to say unequivocally you don't want someone handling your service of process and your compliance documents like they're just run-of-the-mill business mail. These documents have a greater sensitivity. They need to move quickly and correctly to the designated contacts in your organization. And that's just not something you want to leave up to chance.

So once you're sure you have an agent that can do the basics, the things mentioned on this slide, and hopefully do them well, then you can actually start to think about whether your agent provider can help add value in other areas. And we'll talk about some of those as we as we move through this.

So we're going to spend some time talking about the differences between what I've referred to as sort of that check-the-box registered agent and a full-service professional agent. We're going to talk about how CSC specifically goes above and beyond those minim requirements and how CSC focuses on giving you the best version of even those requirements.

So let's start talking about this from the perspective of service of process. This is one of the most critical responsibilities that you give to your registered agent. So it's really important to understand the full scope of what that responsibility actually is. So some companies think of this as only a litigation-related responsibility, but the reality is much broader than that. Registered agents are not just going to receive litigation. They'll also receive things like wage garnishments for any of the employees in your organization. You may be served through your registered agent with a subpoena for records where your organization, who may be a third party to an action, holds records that are relevant to a civil matter between other parties or even a criminal matter.

If you are a potential creditor for someone going through a bankruptcy, you'll receive notifications of bankruptcy through your registered agent, and often that's going to impose upon you certain restrictions on how you can potentially pursue debt collection with that person. So knowing that you've been notified about that is the kind of minimum thing that needs to happen so that you can behave correctly relative to that. Foreclosure filings where your organization has a potential interest in a property, and just honestly a variety of other legal notices, like property violations, workers' comp claims, arbitration notices.

It's sort of an ever-expanding population of documents that show up at the registered agent's door. And you want someone who's equipped to recognize those items, make a clean and timely record of the receipt, and facilitate delivery of those documents to the individuals in your organization that you've designated, and ideally they'll do that through some piece of technology that is focused on dependability, availability, and making sure that that information is conveyed in a secure fashion. Again, with some smaller providers or some providers that are kind of doing registered agent as a bolt-on to something else as opposed to a primary focus, sometimes that delivery is going to be they're just going to stuff it in a FedEx envelope and send it over. Sometimes they're just going to email it over to you. And there's no sort of centralized place where that information resides, so it's very easy for things to get lost in the shuffle or just lost in their entirety. So again, I think you want to have confidence that you're working with a provider who's being more thoughtful and attentive to how critical that transfer of information is.

So CSC has a range of technology solutions for our registered agent customers relative to service of process, and each solution is aimed at organizations with different service of process volumes and complexity. Not only can CSC meet your organization where it is today relative to those needs, but we're also ready to grow with you. So as your needs change, CSC can help make sure you have a solution that fits.

So as we kind of look across these solutions, starting on the left side we have our SOP Manager solution. SOP Manager is our baseline offering in the sense that it's included at no additional cost with your registered agent representation service, but it also delivers everything you need when new SOP is received in your organization. It's going to allow you to quickly acknowledge receipt of the documents so that you can kind of track that that handoff from your agent to your organization has been successful. It's going to allow you to download the documents or email them so that you can move those documents into the appropriate work stream within your organization, make sure they land on the desk of the person who's going to actually take responsibility for responding to them or engaging counsel, whatever the appropriate action is. So again, all of those tools are right there at your at your fingertips. And again, the application is kind of purpose-built for that initiating of those processes.

As we move across, we come to our SOP Pro solution, which builds on those capabilities that we have in SOP Manager. This tool is geared towards organizations with more SOP volume. It is built to handle the needs of an organization who wants to more broadly distribute their service of process. So maybe you have some very focused teams within your organization that handle different subsets of those for either the whole organization or subsets of the organization. So SOP Pro has built into it a routing engine that can basically take any of the data points that CSC collects when we handle the intake of service of process, and all of that data can be used to trigger distribution to different groups or different individuals within your organization. And those can be very fine-grained rules. So really our goal is to kind of reach as far into your process as we can and try to put that in the hands of the person who needs to take action.

In this tool, you also get enhanced search and reporting tools that allow you to make the most of that data that we're collecting. So every piece of data that CSC collects is fully searchable, fully reportable, and those reports are things that you can build and run on demand, or things that can be built and set up to be delivered on a scheduled, recurring basis, so really allowing you to kind of have visibility and make use of the data we're collecting about service of process. So again, as you have higher volume processes, those kinds of things become more important.

And then as we make our way all the way to the right side of this slide and you're in the market for a full end-to-end solution for legal matters, CSC's Enterprise legal management solution has you covered. So everything you need to organize your data and documents, including collaboration tools, fine-grained access controls, reporting, all of those things are part of this application. It also has all the capabilities of SOP Pro and SOP Manager. So we kind of keep building on that foundation.

And this also has legal spend management capabilities. So if you want to take in invoices from outside counsel to have those reviewed and approved and then ultimately moved across to your accounts payable team to issue payment and then track that payment back to those matters, those full capabilities are available there. You can have invoices automatically flagged to make sure that they're conforming to your billing requirements. There's a lot of potential spend saving that you can realize with these tools. So again, that's a fully end-to-end solution.

So again, kind of no matter where you land on this spectrum, we have a tool that is purpose built for that type of use case. And all of these tools also are highly configurable, so we can kind of take the baseline functionality and then modify it to your specific organizational needs.

So we've talked about service of process. Now we're going to kind of switch to the other main responsibility of your registered agent, and that's handling the compliance-related notifications from jurisdictions. So this is going to include things like annual report reminders, franchise tax notifications, and other notifications of requirements that jurisdictions impose upon your entity to remain in good standing to conduct business there.

So similar to service of process, your agent needs to be available to receive these. They need to recognize them and route them to your designated contacts. That's the bare minimum necessary to make sure you don't miss out on or lose sight of important compliance deadlines.

As for how we can enhance that basic requirement, CSC has applied a lot of the same principles that have served us well in the service of process arena to how we deliver compliance mail to our customers. So as more and more of our clients have moved some or all of their staff to hybrid work models, where at least some of their time is spent working from outside the office, forwarding those important notices and time-sensitive notices to our customers via mail or other physical channels, it just doesn't make sense anymore. We've heard that from a lot of customers. So our latest enhancement to our registered agent offering includes electronic delivery of compliance-related notifications, and that happens through our Compliance Mail History solution.

As was mentioned earlier, we'll be walking through a demo of that solution at the end of today's session, but just to tease that a little bit, we'll be looking at the email notifications you'll receive, the complete record of each mail piece that we receive, including the scanned image and fully searchable repository of all of the compliance documents that we've received on your behalf.

Now I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that we can add beyond just the basic registered agent offering. So first, I'm going to talk a little bit about what makes CSC different as a provider. So CSC is truly a global provider. We offer solutions to support the entire life cycle of your business. Our combination of service and technology come together in a way that we hope just makes sense. The goal is to make sure you have line of sight to critical data. We want to make sure you're accessing that through interfaces that are intuitive. And we want to make sure that that information is up to date and timely available to you.

So as an example, as we certainly talked about, CSC can act as your registered agent, but we can also help prepare and file your formation documents or foreign qualifications or any other type of event driven or recurring filings. When we do filings on your behalf, automatic updates to the data and documents for those filings, including calendaring and reminders of good standing events and proactive monitoring and alerting of changes at the state level, all of that will be updated alongside your entity details in our system.

So our technology platform is designed to be both intuitive and configurable. So we can kind of take the best practices that we know work for most customers and then we can modify those through configuration to make sure that they fit your organization. And because our platform contains critical and sometimes sensitive information about your organization, we prioritize security at every level. So it's a consideration at every level of design throughout the application.

And now I'm going to say some words that are very important to your information security teams and possibly also of interest to you. But just to make sure that we get it on the record, all of our applications and data are maintained on CSC's servers in U.S.-based hosting environment, and that environment is ISO 27001 certified and SOC audited. Again, to the right audience, those numbers and letters are very meaningful. Just to underscore like what that truly means is that we're taking care of your data. We're making sure it's secure. We're making sure we're accounting for privacy requirements. All of those things are considered at every level of our design.

So as you can see, we have designed our suite of service offerings to support every phase of an entity's life cycle from formation to the ongoing maintenance to expansion and all the way through dissolution when it's time. Every step of the way we're equipped to facilitate the critical compliance activities for your business. So what you're seeing here is actually a subset of the kind of relevant services that we offer, some of the most critical functions. But we really look at our relationship with customers in this way. We want to be there for you at every step of the progression.

As entities kind of are spun up and kind of go through their progression through these phases, sometimes these happen in short order. Sometimes hopefully for most of your entities, if it makes sense, that dissolution date is way out on the horizon and done as part of a reorganization or just a restructuring of your organization. So again, we try to make sure we're offering useful services along the way at every stage.

So CSC can also provide outsourcing and software solutions to help your organization stay organized and on top of obligations, and in some cases even take them completely off your plate, which is usually music to most people's ears for some of the work that we do because this is often the tedious stuff that is not how you want to spend your day. We live for this stuff, so it's exactly how we want to spend the day. We're going to talk a little bit about what some of those capabilities are.

So all of CSC's corporate compliance solutions are powered by our CSCNavigator platform, which is our online legal and compliance portfolio management system. So we provide solutions for service of process as we've already discussed, annual report compliance, entity management, managing business licenses, and handling the governance and management of your global subsidiaries. So we're going to discuss some of those advanced solutions in greater detail. So let's talk about what that looks like here at CSC.

So first of all, almost every jurisdiction has some concept of an annual report that entities need to file just to maintain their good standing. Those can go by a variety of names, but they all serve a similar purpose. And as similar as they can be, as I said before, they're sort of the same, but they can also be very different.. So they can have different formats, different data requirements, different deadlines. The methods for filing may be different. The costs are certainly going to be different. So it can be tricky to keep up with all of those moving parts as your business expands to new jurisdictions.

So let's continue to talk about what CSC can do in this space. So CSC offers a full outsourcing option for annual reports, where we can prepare and file those reports for you, and this service covers all aspects of the process.

And I see in the chat we have a question, and I'll try to address it as we walk through here. So the question in the chat is, "I don't understand the difference between an annual report that CSC would do for us and an annual report that an outside counsel would do." So in many cases, they may be the same exact reports. I think our methods are different, and especially as you're looking not for a single entity in a single jurisdiction, but as you're looking at that across multiple jurisdictions, I think that's really where the differences start to show, and I'll talk about that as we kind of work across this slide.

So prior to filing, we have our pre-filing services, where CSC is going to complete an initial audit of the status of all of your entities. So when we do that, we are going to discover all of your entities, all the jurisdictions they're doing business in, and we have integrations with state level data that allow us to pull back all of the current status and information about those entities and pull that together in a comprehensive audit. And as we do that, we almost inevitably will discover things that are different than you expected, entities that are not in good standing that you thought were, entities that still exist that you thought you had dissolved, jurisdictions where you thought you were doing business but you're not or at least you're not registered to do business. So all of those things can be surfaced and corrected through this process.

So as we do this, part of what you're going to get is the results of that audit, and we'll work with you to identify what action needs to be taken. CSC will deliver a report outlining all of your upcoming filings 45 days in advance, along with the good standing status of each entity that has a filing due in that window.

As we are moving across the slide, we then get into the actual filing. This is sort of the bread and butter of this service. This is where we're preparing and filing your annual reports, we're preparing and submitting franchise tax reports. We'll work with you to collect the data and make sure that that is up to date and accurate before the filings occur.

And then once those filings occur, CSC will upload the filed evidence into CSCNavigator. So it'll automatically link the documents, those evidence documents to your entities so that you'll be able to see for easy review the current status and confirm that everything you're expecting to be filed has been filed. This is a web-based portal, so you'll have 24/7 access to that information. And then, CSC will also update the Good Standing Compliance Calendar in Navigator in real time so that you can check the status of those annual report filing events. The secretary of state good standing status is going to be visible in Navigator, ensuring complete transparency. So you'll be able to see our information alongside the state's information, making sure it's in sync and as you expect. And so that's going to be part of how this service is delivered.

So the annual report requirements start to underscore the importance of having all of your critical entity vitals in a single source of truth that's organized and maintained. This is a concept generally referred to as entity management, and that's what we're going to talk about next.

So when we talk about entity management in today's context, what we're talking about is a software-based solution that will cover all of the critical requirements. So it'll be a repository for all of your important entity data. You'll have the ability to leverage that data to quickly create org charts in multiple formats. So if anyone has ever had to try to do that manually or wrestle with Visio or some other tool to make that happen, the ease and simplicity of clicking a few buttons, making a few choices, and having that rendered on screen, it's like a magic trick the first time you see it. And then you just realize how much time you've saved. It's one of my favorite features of the application and one that we continue to enhance to make sure we're kind of handling all the needs around that that you might have.

We can also track your officer and director information. You can use the tool to manage minute books and store electronic documents. All of that data and information is also available to you through reporting. So there's a whole suite of reports that are ready to go when you first log in to the application, and all of your data just flows into those directly. So you can run those on demand. It'll always be real time and up to the minute, and this is going to give you line of sight to all of that entity information in a way that really helps you find insights in terms of how that information shapes up and how things look kind of in the aggregate.

You're also going to have line of sight to your important compliance events. So without a tool like this, if you're kind of managing this outside of a tool today, this is something that happens through emails and spreadsheets. And honestly, again, it's just an opportunity for things to get lost in the shuffle. Things can get out of date, out of sync, or you're spending a ton of time reorganizing this information every year as you kind of cycle through those compliance obligations. And having a tool where that just all comes together in a way that makes sense, especially if you're up against looming deadlines, it's just one of the things that just immediately shows you the value of a solution like this.

So CSC's Entity Management platform is a foundational component of our Navigator platform, and it's completely integrated with all of our other compliance solutions. In addition to the key components that I mentioned on the prior slide, our entity solution also includes tracking for your registered DBA names, support for Section 16 filing, there's an eSignature workflow. You can track stock and ownership management. There's a merger transaction workflow. You can track calendar events for your compliance requirements. Again, the reporting that we mentioned. And also we have integrations with human capital management systems, so again a way to connect your entity details with other information where you need to kind of combine those elements and keep things up to date.

So as with all of the CSC solutions, this is a solution that we continue to enhance and invest in. These products are meant to kind of grow with our customer base. As new compliance obligations or other related activities become necessities, we try to build the application to continue to meet customers where they need to be. So we try to support the broadest range of needs that we can for both current customers and future customers.

So one of the biggest challenges that we're seeing customers facing, and this was one of the things that folks responded to in the last poll, is the challenges around in an increasingly global economy keeping up with all of your compliance requirements across the globe. So I mentioned before that moving from jurisdiction to jurisdiction within the U.S. can have all sorts of nuance and complexity to it. Well, that is tenfold the complexity as you move across international borders. So the requirements from country to country are very nuanced and complicated, and often very different from what we're used to in the United States.

So for CSC, we understand those challenges, and we have designed our Global Subsidiary Management service to address them directly. So one of the things we want to make sure is that rather than you having to try to cobble together and then corral a patchwork of different providers across the world, CSC will give you a single point of contact and a dedicated service team. And with those, they'll be able to directly access in-country expertise to make sure that you're dealing with one person and they're doing all the leg work of pulling together those requirements from each country where you're doing business.

We also proactively track relevant legislative changes and keep our annual Global Compliance Calendar up to date based on those. We give you the opportunity to manage all of these activities under a single agreement that's customized to your organization's precise needs. You'll end up with one invoice with competitive and fixed annual corporate fees. And all of this work is going to be reflected in our Entity Management solution. So it's going to give you the clearest possible picture of your portfolio, probably the clearest picture that you've ever had.

We've designed this offering to be again specifically attentive to the organization needs of customers trying to do business in new jurisdictions or trying to manage all the jurisdictions where they do business, whether they are domestic or international. So our goal here is to make sure that we have best practices as sort of the steel thread through everything and then configuration where it makes sense and where it's useful to our customers. So what we're trying to do is sort of offer bespoke services but at scale. So we want to have you covered for all of your annual compliance needs.

We can support your transactional needs as they arise, and we can also augment those basic services with other specialized services that you may need for non-U.S. entities. So that's what you'll see on the far right of the slide, some examples of that. This is something where we are trying to again find the right balance of leveraging our existing expertise and our network of in-country expertise to make sure that we give you a uniform experience that you can rely on and that keeps you on the right side of compliance.

Okay, so one of the main responses in our last poll question was around business licenses. So this is another area where CSC can support your organization's ongoing filing requirements relative to managing business licenses and permits. So we'll talk a little bit about that.

So beyond just having your business registered with the state, almost every entity also has to establish and renew one or more types of business license at the state, county, and/or local level. Depending on the type of business you're conducting, your licensing requirements will vary, and it can be extremely challenging to just understand what is required, let alone actually keeping up with the filing and renewal of those licenses. Failure to maintain the proper licensing can result in late fees, fines, lawsuits. And at their worst, it can cause business interruptions and closures. We have had customers come to us after they've had a bad experience trying to open a new location, building up to a specific launch date for that location only to find they don't have the right licensing in place, and they're not able to open their doors as expected.

So what happens is honestly many organizations just simply don't have the in-house expertise to identify and track and maintain all the information that's necessary to keep up with those licenses. Sometimes we even see there's lots of confusion related to who even has the responsibility to do that in an organization, and sometimes it's scattered. So again, a consistent theme hopefully that you're noticing in this, CSC has tools that will help bring that all together so that you're really maintaining this in a way that is controllable.

So let's talk about some of the services that we offer relative to business licenses. We are trying to have an offering here for each kind of discrete category of needs that we've seen with customers. So sometimes it's just gathering that initial information, so CSC offers research services to help you identify the licenses necessary for your existing locations or any new locations that you're looking to open. So again, just sort of helping you understand what is required in that place. So we can help with that.

We also have a fully outsourced model, where we kind of take the work of collecting, organizing, and maintaining your licenses across your portfolio out of your hands and into the hands of our dedicated service team. Again, they'll work with you to gather and organize the information, but you'll have that single source of truth, that full perspective on your whole license portfolio. You'll be able to work through a single point of contact, and they will help you ensure that you're on top of all of your licensing obligations.

And then, if you'd prefer to manage things in-house but you are doing this through spreadsheets or something else that is not up to the task, we have a software solution that we can offer, which is our CSC License Pro solution. It is purpose-built to manage business licenses and permit portfolios. So it's just an incredibly robust application where again, if you want to handle this in-house, it's the best possible tool that you can have for that type of challenge.