Overcoming Complexity: Top Considerations for Global Entities

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Caitlin: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Overcoming Complexity: Top Considerations for Global Entities." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today are John LaPalomento and Rogier Bronk. John is Global Subsidiary Management Leader. He has been with CSC for more than 14 years. John works with GSM prospects to present an accurate and clear scope of services, including demonstrating CSC Entity Management. Rogier has worked across many different disciplines and with a wide variety of clients, ranging from large multinational to private to clients. With 25 years of experience, this has provided him with a broad understanding of client requirements that have been instrumental in helping them find the right solution to add value to their organizations. And with that, let's welcome John and Rogier.

John: Caitlin, thanks so much, and we want to welcome everybody joining our call from around the world. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you may be. My name is John LaPalomento. And we're happy to share time with you. Thank you for sharing your time with us.

Today we're going to be talk talking about quite a bit, but of course we're going to be focusing our attention today on considerations for entities around the world. Whether you have them already or you're considering expanding globally, CSC is here to help, and we're going to share some information with you about your needs around the world.

We're going to be looking at quite a few different things. First of all, starting a little bit about CSC, our 125 plus year legacy, our global footprint, and of course the proactive, consolidated, and centralized services we offer around the world. We're going to be talking about the Global Counsel Barometer report that we explored. This is a CSC-commissioned survey and research project discussing global needs around the world with general counsels located in different parts of the world and some great findings there that we're happy to uncover. We're going to be talking about top considerations for entities situated around the world, considerations you may have, risk considerations, regulatory considerations, and best practices for managing those entities.

Of course, we're happy to highlight the CSC solution, our Global Subsidiary Management Service, which is a centralized and proactive approach to corporate secretarial governance around the world in about 145 countries. So we're eager always to shine a spotlight on how CSC can help our prospects and clients around the world.

And we do want to save plenty of time for questions and answers. We want to make sure we're answering your questions. Of course, you're more than welcome to hold questions. But if you have your widget open for Q&A, you can type a question in that Q&A widget at any point in time. We will address it in the moment if it's relevant or save it till the end if that makes more sense. We want to make sure that your questions are answered.

So we're looking forward to going through all of this today. And by all means, please use your Q&A widget. Before we dive in here, I want to say hi to my friend and colleague, Rogier, who is with us. Rogier, how are you today down in Miami?

Rogier: I'm good. Thank you, John. Looking forward to put a little bit more light on considerations for expanding globally and uncover some of the facts that are also in our barometer report. So please do continue.

John: Very good. Well, great information to share. And starting a little bit about CSC, I would think that just about everybody joining this call has an idea of who we are and what we do when it comes to our services. But for a very good reason organizations have considered CSC a U.S. service provider over our 125-year legacy. But I want to make it very fair and clear to say that CSC has been working globally around the world for over 50 years, over 5 decades of experience, and we have done tremendous work in the global corporate secretarial space over the last dozen years.

We're trusted by over 90% of the Fortune 500, and we represent 90% of the 100 Best and Most Recognized Global Brands. We have over 8,000 employees around the world. And, of course, many of you are probably aware about 18 months ago we completed our $3 billion acquisition of the Intertrust Group, which bolstered our existing services and added parallel services to CSC's portfolio of business services around the world. We're here to provide best-in-class services to our clients with a concierge level of support everywhere around the world. And, of course, today we're going to be focusing on our Global Subsidiary Management services and of course considerations that you might have when it comes to your global entities around the world.

I'd like to introduce our barometer report that we had commissioned in 2024. We surveyed over 300 general counsel offices to understand concerns, to understand needs and capabilities. We asked several different things. First of all, understanding plans for expansion of new subsidiaries in the upcoming year. We tried to understand where general counsel offices were most likely to set up new subsidiaries, where there were concerns, where there was risk and question marks around risk. And we also tried to understand and bring into focus the third-party legal operations and support with whom they'd be liaising, whether they were working with firms and organizations like CSC, working with local counsel in different jurisdictions. And, of course, we uncovered a ton of information, and we found some consistencies through everything that we found. Rogier, why don't you share a little bit about our findings with the barometer report?

Rogier: Yeah. Yeah, and I liked the fact that you used the word "consistencies," right? Our barometer report that we commissioned last year showed a similar trend in highlighting the main challenges our clients have when they expand globally. Challenges when putting infrastructure in place quickly often comes with the fact that they have maybe received or won a bid. They need to go into country rather quickly. They're working with outside counsel, discussing the right structure or even entity type. And then, all of a sudden, they knock on our door saying like, "Okay, we need to be in business the next day."

Infrastructure is always going to be a challenge, right, whether you form an entity and then still need to set up a bank account because those time frames might be a little bit different. Setting up an entity or forming an entity is often a few days work even in LatAm, where we see a large percentage of our interviewed general counsels have a need for expanding into, compared to setting up the bank account in those jurisdictions, it might take weeks or even months. So when we look at the overall findings of the barometer, it's definitely that the majority of the general counsels see the main issue in the challenge of infrastructure, infrastructure as in getting boots on the ground, but also getting the right structure in place to service the entity locally. And, of course, it goes hand in hands with the jurisdictions that they're going into.

As I mentioned, 96% of multinationals plan to maintain or grow their geographic footprint in 2024. It coincides with the fact that 50% is going into LatAm. Why do I point out LatAm and not so much the U.S. or the UK? Well, the U.S. is by default almost the number one in expanding into. Most of the clients abroad would like to have at least one entity to service the U.S. market.

When we look at LatAm, there are more challenges in general to take in consideration, geopolitical reasons, obviously language barriers, cultural barriers, the workforce, but also the overall complexity of the regulatory landscape in the majority of the jurisdictions. So difficult to understand local legal systems, right? Yes, you have a provider like CSC Global who can assist you and navigate those legal systems. We know, based on best practices, what we need to do and what needs to be done to keep the entity in good legal standing. However, as I mentioned, it's often that it's a reactive approach that not only providers but also in-house legal teams have when they're expanding into jurisdictions, whether it's driven by an acquisition elsewhere in the globe that now the structure needs to be completely changed, or that, as I mentioned earlier, a bid has won and now the entity needs to be set up.

So often going into a market quickly presents all types of challenges. And then we look at the confidence those in-house legal teams have in themselves and their providers. And there's a lack of confidence, not so much in the employees of our of our clients because they know exactly how their structure works, but it's often the unknown or not known items that need to be followed in a specific order as well. So the confidence with in-country legal expertise is sometimes very difficult. Law firms are often the first go-to because they provide the legal advisory part of expanding internationally, but often don't take on registered office or domiciliation services or provide directors in-country who then can assist with day-to-day operations.

John, I'm pretty sure, based on the barometer report, that you have your own set of findings and maybe you can highlight a few of those as well. I always encourage the audience to download the report and look at it overall. But going into a country is always a challenge, whether you have these percentages in front of you or not. John.

John: Yeah I agree, Rogier, and I will say that it's the lack of confidence that we saw. Over a third of general counsel offices who struggle to understand regulation and to really understand local systems and requirements is challenging. And what I commonly see is people who are based in certain regions of the world sometimes thinking that these same regulatory requirements and obligations apply around the world, and that's just not the truth, right? There are differences not just regionally but country by country and even within a country. From a different corporate structure or tax structure, there's going to be different requirements and obligations in place.

And it is a challenging situation. There's bad information on the internet, right? This is not as simple as Googling and finding an answer. So having trusted parties with whom you liaise, having law firms who can give you the proper guidance and tax structuring advice, and having firms like CSC, who are trustworthy, who have the experience, who have the knowledge, and most importantly can simplify and help you understand your requirements, removing language barriers, removing time zone challenges, removing budget uncertainty, bringing things into focus but doing so in a way that is beneficial to your office and to your organization is definitely I think the secret sauce to making this as easy as is possible. As complex as global corporate secretarial governance is and regulations are, if there's any way to simplify it and find some streamlining, that's what our clients and our prospects are looking for.

Rogier: Yeah. Thank you, John. It's definitely when we look at also the next slide considerations for global entities, right, and we discussed briefly what the barometer report mentions. APAC is definitely out there growing in interest or expanding into. There always has been a springboard to manufacturing facilities in the low-cost and where the more economical jurisdictions out there. As I mentioned, the U.S. or North America, in general, is always out there in the top three to expand into. Just be closer to your markets, etc. is key. Now when we speak about the increase in percentage of going into LatAm, it's a completely different ball game.

As I mentioned, there are a lot of considerations. And it's interesting that our barometer report just focuses on challenges and considerations because I think the entire audience is like, "Okay, if we do have the challenges and considerations lined up so to say and researched, there is one main point that is hovering above it and is, of course, the cost." And most of our clients have done a market analysis. They know exactly what they can expect. They know a little bit about the employment group that they can expect in country. They have either spoken already with a CSC employee about assisting them locally, whether it's forming the entity or the ongoing maintenance thereof. But it comes back down to cost and other factors of how to put that in place.

So when we look in the risk to corporate governance I always said like, okay, you have your geopolitical challenges, you have your formation challenges, and now we have a whole set of new challenges to be considered when you're going into a new jurisdiction. Digital transformation was obviously the last 10, 15 years the most common topic for most in-house legal teams to streamline their organizations. Now an added consideration is obviously what cybersecurity risk those systems pose to your organization.

I will skip a few bullet points because actually artificial intelligence is connecting to the digital transformation currently that all of our clients undergo. And it comes from increased workloads, smaller in-house legal teams, changing regulatory landscape is constant, and then you add a region like LatAm to it and it becomes extremely challenging to find out what is correct, who provides the right answer. One question can have multiple answers. So to navigate all of those risks and mitigate them to a single provider because multiple providers might be able to do the job cost effectively, but if it's a long-term solution that our clients are looking for, working with multiple vendors, having the exposure to data privacy issues, artificial intelligence challenges, and then with an increased workload and smaller in-house legal teams, having to deal with multiple vendors only adds an additional strain to your organization.

So streamlining starting at the end is often key, while the focus remains on how to implement the framework, navigate through all the corporate governance challenges, and how to deal in these days with artificial intelligence because, yes, it's a great tool. On the one end, if we are relying on it and you don't know the exact content as feedback, maybe I see it too simple as a Google on steroids. We trust sometimes the feedback of our systems too much. So hence, we need boots on the grounds. That's why often our clients end up with multiple vendors in country, not knowing that a company like CSC Global can basically take over all of the functions of their local providers, making it more efficient to immediately deal with one person or a single team that's dedicated to the portfolio that we have under administration.

So it's a lot to consider both from a risk perspective, how you can mitigate that risk to a single provider, but also all the other corporate governance features that you see on this particular slide need to be taken in consideration in order to get a really good solid framework in place. Now that being said, which is really one of the key items of CSC Global, not one size fits all, right? Hence, most of our clients like to stay with multiple vendors. They like the boots on the ground. They like the in-depth knowledge that the local offices have. So knowing that CSC Global has a bespoke framework that can be set up in such a way that you do have a single point of contact, but that you also have the possibility of connecting locally with subject matter experts and the whole knowledge bank that also our teams use to service our clients is key. What works today might not work 12 months from now after an acquisition or an establishment in LatAm or elsewhere in the world.

John: You know, on this slide still, when it comes to risk, what is commonly shared with me with prospects and incoming clients is the piece around multiple vendors. When you're working with multiple vendors, inevitably you're going to have some strong vendors, but you're going to have some weaknesses in some jurisdictions and a lack of trust, improper communication, even billing errors. Let's face it. If it's time spent working out billing errors, that is time that you're losing from productive work, and I hear that on a on a day-to-day basis.

So I see multiple vendors here, while these are all significant risks, when working with multiple vendors and a lack of consistency how services are rendered around the world, when I say lack of consistency, I'm not suggesting that you would treat an Australian proprietary limited company the same way you would treat a Brazilian limitada, right? They're very different, and they're managed differently. But the backbone around communication, the backbone around invoicing and budgeting and so on can be consistent and can be trustworthy when you're replacing multiple points of contact with a single conduit of trustworthy information.

Rogier: Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Consistency in delivery of services is key. Sometimes even in organizations that are large and have a large wholly owned footprint, right, they'd rather support the startup bringing in 25K than turning around good standing certificates for an existing client that doesn't really move the needle internally. So having a provider that really puts a blanket over all those jurisdictions and raising the good and the bad and really creating those efficiencies is key. So yeah, thank you for that, John.

John: Let's talk a little bit about technology and the use of technology in legal operations. Technology poses great strength when you're working around the world. Technology also poses great risk when you're working around the world. And I would suggest that having bad data is worse than having no data. And, of course, you can't have no data, right? That's never going to work for you. So the strength in terms of how your managing data and document management by way of technology is so, so important around the world. Only using technology, is that reducing risk, or is that creating risk? The truth is that you have to have people. There is manual effort when it comes to the workload of corporate secretarial governance and maintaining required documentation around the world.

What I very commonly see from different service providers are providers who provide either technology or service as opposed to technology and service. And I would ask you the question if you're using a technology provider, exactly how you're mitigating risk. Of course, maintaining information is critical, and making sure that it's always up to date and real and wholesome is important. But question how easy that is to maintain if you're not having the same folks manage the happenings around the world.

Data governance, how is the data being maintained, is the data being maintained, and is the quality of the data where it needs to be? Is it trustworthy? There are obligations in plenty of jurisdictions to keep track of specific pieces of data, to have registers available for audit and inspection, and in many cases a digital version of that is perfectly allowable. But it's a matter of where that responsibility lies and who's holding the keys to that data. If a third-party provider is maintaining your data, how do you trust it?

This is something that I hear on a weekly basis from incoming new clients of CSC is that a service provider, oftentimes using any kind of bolt-on third-party technology, part of their enticing offer is we're going to maintain your data for you. I encourage you to demonstratively ask questions about that. How is it being maintained, who is maintaining it, and with what frequency is that data upkept? I hear it all the time that clients come in saying, "We're looking at our data and we don't know if this is old data or current data. We don't know if this is trustworthy data. It's being maintained, but we don't know by whom. We don't know how trustworthy it is." If you can't eat off your data because it's so clean, it's doing you a disservice and it's setting you up for significant risk. So using technology to your benefit is extremely strong. But when technology is a hindrance and technology creates risk, well, it's the opposite.

Rogier: Yeah.

John: Talking a little bit about the considerations when working around the world and some of the challenges that you may see and differences in terms of style, local support versus centralized maintenance. Now in a few moments we're going to present to you the CSC solution, and I'll go ahead and burst the bubble that we're here to provide a centralized approach, centralized within the confines of your goal, right? Not forcefully centralized. We have hubs for our services around the world, and we can regionalize and localize things for you if that's your goal. The majority of our clients come to us looking for a centralized approach, and we're going to talk about our centralized approach.

Local support is different, right? Local support is a different office, a different touch point in every jurisdiction where you're working. I'll be honest in saying that if your organization is working in one jurisdiction outside of your home jurisdiction, local support might make perfect sense. It's easy to manage a relationship with one firm in the UK who's managing your single limited company in the UK.

But when you have a portfolio of businesses, of subsidiaries, of foreign registrations around the world crossing borders, local support is challenging because you're duplicating your efforts. You're taking a single effort and multiplying it by 10 for the 10 countries. You're struggling with language barriers. You're struggling with understanding your budgeting in hourly rates in every currency under the sun. A good centralized approach can bring those different touch points into one conduit of information. So we believe that a centralized model is going to reduce risk for you, reduce cost for you, reduce your workload for you, and do so in a simplified way.

Rogier: Yeah. And, John, that really taps into actually the last bullet point on the screen, fixed versus bespoke service delivery framework, right? We know providers out there that have a set framework in place and that is fixed. And one of the things that really stands out also from the barometer report is most of our clients are looking for a hybrid solution. They have gone through the digitalization of their in-house legal team. They have now all the tools in place based on their structure, their own framework. Maybe they work in parallel or they have separate divisions. They're looking for a provider that can support them in all jurisdictions that they're in. John mentioned that we are in over 140 jurisdictions.

But they're also looking for a bespoke service solution, meaning that these are the requirements from the client as an organization that we, as CSC Global can adhere to. What works today might not work tomorrow or next week. So there needs to be some flexibility, flexibility in how we approach the service solution, in how we set up the framework. Where are the main points of contact for these clients? Is it a U.S. headquartered client, but their counterparts in EU and APAC are supporting the brunt of the work?

So we need to be able to be flexible. And I think it's key when people are looking at a service solution provider to really filter out fixed versus bespoke and bespoke in the sense of flexibility. John.

John: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Flexibility is key, and we see that regularly in a post-COVID world. I think I can say the word "post,"' right? But during COVID, there was so much flexibility needed. If we were rigid, it would not have worked, right? We have organizations, clients of ours closing offices, or moving, making changes and there are services that need to be rendered and we were there to pick those services up. There are change of regulations in country that require you to roll with the punches. And the truth is that all of our clients and even folks that are not our clients, right, global organizations have internal capabilities that are different than others' internal capabilities, and they have additional needs that are different than others' additional needs. And we're here to take a very malleable solution and to fit those needs and to build a bespoke service offering that makes the most sense.

Quite frankly, something that is fixed and that is rigid, what I see commonly, well, the services that this other provider is providing is an annual general meeting and an annual accounts filing in every jurisdiction. Well, not in the UK where there is no annual general meeting, right? So I see it all the time where the fixed offering does not mold to the needs in country, the needs of the requirement or the needs of the client.

Rogier: Yeah, and it also, John, advisory versus best practices, we as CSC Global cannot provide legal or tax advice. But this really connects also with the bespoke service delivery framework. We understand that sometimes you do have the need to ask in-house legal team together with your tax or finance director to have that conversation on a local level with the folks of our office in Luxembourg or Ireland or the Netherlands or Singapore where those questions might pop up more regularly than elsewhere in the globe. So it is important to be able to have that flexibility with a provider, but still having it coordinated and service from a central point of approach.

Now advisory versus best practices, we cannot provide legal advice. But all our employees worldwide have either tax, finance, or legal background, which means that we understand the structures that are being implemented and that we are going to have to look after. If there are any discrepancies or doubt about solidifying the structure, we will flag it right away and have that conversation on a local level. Best practices is not advice. But I always tell our clients utilize our internal teams that support you with these type of services globally. They will be able to provide you information based on best practices that other otherwise would have cost you another invoice if you would have gone through your regular channels with outside legal counsel.

John: So we are happy to turn the page to shine some light on the CSC solution, which we feel we've developed as a real strength to our clients and it answers the call of our prospects and clients who are looking for a centralized approach that brings efficiencies. When I talk about centralization, I talk about a centralization in a number of different ways, and I'm going to start talking about that a little bit. On this slide here, of course, we're looking at some of the different challenges and how CSC can bring this into focus. And it's really centralization that's the key word here.

I talk about centralization as a three-lane highway, the first lane being the centralization of your workflows, giving you a single point of contact regionally based and close to home, who is here to be in or close to your time zone, who is here to take a proactive approach to your regularly scheduled, calendared obligations, such as annual general meetings, annual account filings, the satisfaction of certain appointments if you have those needs, as well as a single point of contact for changes that you may need to facilitate throughout the year, changes of director, changes of address, formation of new companies, dissolution of old companies, merger and acquisition activities. That single point of contact becomes a member of your team. They're a concierge. They are your right-hand person when it comes to your regular obligations and those additional needs.

The second highway or lane of centralization is the centralized and automated capture of data and documentation in our award-winning technology. We are technology agnostic. So if you have existing technology, well, we're certainly happy to get our hands dirty in that technology and keep it updated for you. But the majority of our clients certainly thrive in the CSC Entity Management proprietary solution for managing entity data globally. And everything is captured in real time without that ever head scratching, "Is this right or is this wrong?" It is imperative that we maintain that information because it is the workbench through which we manage your entities around the world.

The third part of centralization I'll discuss is I think it's easy to overlook this until you're neck deep in it, and that is centralizing the administrative burden of managing entities and managing multiple vendors versus a single vendor. Having a single point of contact when it comes to account management and strategy, having a single point of contact if desired when it comes to invoicing and billing, having flat rate costs in a given currency, in U.S. dollars and pound sterling and euro, having that budget certainty, and having a single process for your global needs can truly free you up to do the things that make the most sense.

So our goal is to take all of the challenges that you see here and to boil them down into a single conduit, a single agreement, a single service platform when it comes to managing your needs around the world.

Rogier: John, I want to highlight one specific item on the previous slide, which is actually the proactive approach. A lot of our clients that we speak to, they understand the single point of contact. As John said, they might have their own technology. We're more than happy to get our hands dirty, where we have our award-wining entity management system. When they have an entity management system, whether it's ours or a third-party, off-the-shelf system, they have a compliance calendar. And they're kind of used to having their single providers reach out and take a proactive stand to upcoming due dates.

Now we go one step further, which I think is the most important one because, in general, every provider out there, whether you work with a local provider, with a regional or global provider, they all have a fiduciary duty to inform you about changes in local legislation. However, the way we are set up, we're actually set up in such a way, we'll go over framework in a little bit, that we capture all the information from our local offices and partners of changes in local legislation. This will then go through what we call our Knowledge Bank. It's a separate team that is on top of all those latest documents that need to be used by our teams that are providing these services.

Now once it's all captured in our Knowledge Bank, then the dedicated client servicing teams and the single point of contact can really reach out specifically about an entity type in Australia. So if something is changing on the ground in Australia six months from now, your dedicated client servicing team will reach out and discuss that change with you. Like I said, every provider out there has a fiduciary duty, but they most likely will just send an email, mass email about the changes or a newsletter. And when you open it, it says tax relief or tax legislation. So if you get to opening that email to begin with, it goes through to the recycle bin, only to find out at six months from now you're non-compliant in Australia and you wonder what happened.

So when we speak about risk mitigation, it's important to note that CSC is fully aware of these changes in country. So if you want to mitigate your risk to a global provider, they need to have this proactive approach. Otherwise, six months from now and that's what we find out often when we go through our corporate health check, right, John, that they think that everything is in good shape and order because they have a certain cadence, only to find out that they are not adhering to the latest changes in local legislation. John, back to you.

John: Very well stated, Rogier. Thank you very much.

I'm happy to shine a little more light and bring to the surface the CSC Global Subsidiary Management service. CSC, as I mentioned at the outset of the call, we've been working internationally for over five decades, and over the last dozen years or so we have, I think, really intelligently built this proactive, centralized support service that we call Global Subsidiary Management. You'll commonly hear us throw around the acronym GSM. And this is your consistent approach and centralized approach to corporate secretarial maintenance around the world.

As an aside to this slide, I'd like to first quickly highlight the simplification of transfer to CSC, which looks different in different jurisdictions, right? When you're transferring existing entities to us, in some jurisdictions we may be taking on appointments of company secretary. We might be moving the physical minute books to our keep and changing the registered office address to our addresses locally. And in some jurisdictions, we're simply flipping the switch and taking on the ongoing corporate secretarial burden, letting the existing provider know that we've got it from here.

But we're here to do this with a level of consistency, and we do so by centralizing the collection of data. You're not working with different teams in different countries for the collection of AML and KYC due diligence. You have a single point of contact to gather that data and to try to simplify that as much as possible. I want to be very fair in saying that with any provider or any banking institution or any legal services provider like this, there's going to be a lift upfront to satisfy those obligations. But at the top of that mountain are these beautiful, clean and green pastures of centralization and proactivity. And again, we're collecting that due diligence centrally, and we're not billing hourly for that kind of work like everybody else under the sun is.

Most valuably to our clients, at the time of transfer, we undergo, as Rogier had referred, an exhaustive audit of each entity, that we call the corporate health check. We are not the only organization who uses the term "corporate health check." However, our corporate health check is built differently. It's not simply an extract from the registry and sending it off to you to help you review it. Our corporate health check organizes jurisdictional specifics, addresses, identification numbers. It brings into focus the location of your physical minute books or at least discloses where they need to be. We understand current appointments, officers, directors, outstanding powers of attorney, which in a post-COVID world when business registries were shut down or understaffed and there were balls dropped everywhere, bringing that into focus and understanding where things might be askew is critical.

We're going to understand your calendar of events, all of the dates and deadlines for your annual obligations. Not just telling you what's required, but breaking that regulation down into considerations against your dates, against your fiscal year end, understanding when your annual accounts are due. Bringing into focus where quarterly meetings are required as opposed to annual meetings. And then taking all of this data and populating our award-winning technology so you have transparency, you have visibility in terms of what's coming up, and you have historical information at your fingertips for what we've already done for you.

So that's all part of the transfer over to CSC, which I will tell you we have the right people and the right experts in place to make that as simple as possible. But the core of this slide, of course, is our ongoing services.

And our base service, our most important thing that we discuss, when it comes to our ongoing services, we call Annual Compliance Support. Annual Compliance Support, through my eyes, was very intelligently built. There is this flexibility. There is not that fixed approach that we referenced a few slides ago. Our goal with Annual Compliance Support is to bundle together regular inclusions in different jurisdictions. And it's going to look different. Your inclusions for a UK private limited company is going to look different from your inclusions for a Japanese KK. And our goal is to put those inclusions together based on common practices and regulation.

That's not to say that we include every requirement because that would not make sense. We would not suggest that you employ our services to satisfy a local director requirement if you have your own people to do it. That's where we're going to talk about best practice and make sure that we're steering our clients in a way that makes the most sense.

Generally speaking, Annual Compliance Support is going to be offered to you for a flat rate. That rate will vary a little bit by jurisdiction based on the nuances of the jurisdiction. But for that flat rate, we're going to generally include the management of your minute books and shareholder registers, always digitally within our technology, but physically in country where we're appointed to do so.

We're going to attend to your annual general meeting obligations, and that's quite flexible. In a jurisdiction like the Netherlands, where you would always meet by circular resolution, we're going to draft that resolution for you in dual languages to satisfy requirements. In a jurisdiction like the UK, where there's no meeting obligation, well, we're going to meet that accordingly. In jurisdictions where you would have a physical meeting, we would draft the notice, agenda, and a pro forma set of minutes to be utilized. In a jurisdiction like India, where you have quarterly meetings and an annual shareholders meeting, we're going to facilitate all five of those meetings, including opening the shareholder meeting in country to satisfy those requirements. So this is not a blanket statement of the AGM is included. This is an intelligent inclusion that varies by regulation in different jurisdictions.

We're also going to include for no additional cost I'll loosely say the filing of your annual reports, your annual accounts, your annual returns, those financial and informational filings that are due to the business registry. The drafting and filing of your solvency resolution in Australia, the filing and preparation of your UK filings due to Companies House. Any filings that you have due to the Business Registry. Now I'll bifurcate tax filings from corporate filings. We're here to handle the corporate side of things. Of course, locally in country, we do have plenty of offices who can support those tax filings if you have the needs, but within the confines of this centralized Global Subsidiary Management Service, we're working at the corporate level.

In a number of jurisdictions, we include certain specific appointments. When we take on your services in Singapore, we include the provision of company secretary. When we take on your services in Australia, we include the provision of ASIC agent. These are services that are assumed as part of your corporate secretarial services rather than being an extra charge, an upsell, more money coming out of your budget. We make that all worthwhile for you.

Our Annual Compliance Support services includes the monitoring for regulatory changes, as Rogier has highlighted, and the strength that's there. In addition to these regular annual services, you have options to add to satisfy additional needs that your organization may have, including domiciliation or registered office services. We can provide registered office services wherever legally permissible. We're going to always advise you where it makes more sense to use your own office. But if you don't have one or if it's not trustworthy, you have the ability to have CSC take on those needs. Director services, again, I'm always going to suggest that you use your own director level personnel where you can. But if you can't, we're here to take that burden off of your shoulders and to simplify those processes.

And, of course, any kind of transactional work that you may have throughout the year, as we've referenced already. Formation of new companies, registration of foreign companies, changes of director, changes of address, changes of fill in the blank, we're here to make that easy for you. At the time of request, we would provide a real cost for that service based on the efficiencies of your portfolio, based on the nuances of your bylaws. We're happy to put a flat rate cost in your hands about 90% of the time, and the 10% of the time where an hourly component is necessary, we're going to make that as fair and simple as we possibly can.

Rogier, any consideration to those regular annual services, or would you like to comment on any of the additional specialized services that we offer?

Rogier: Thank you, John. But I think it's mentioned already before. If you look at the Transaction Services, director and registered office are not the traditional transactional services. They're still per annum. But here, you can clearly see also the difference that a global provider like CSC brings to the table compared to a local law firm, who often shies away way of taking on the risk of appointing a director or a registered office as domiciliation services. So if you want to indeed have one-stop shop, the technology, the dedicated client servicing team, the services that John just went over, it is almost a no-brainer to add and at least take a closer look at services that cannot be provided by a local law firm or even a regional law firm.

And then, of course, John, you still have your Specialized Services, right? So it's not something that we stop at a certain point with providing corporate services. There are others as well.

John: Yeah, we're here to make that as simple as we possibly can. And we want to remind everybody while we are going to save some time for Q&A, please take advantage of the Q&A widget that you have access to on your system there. And if we can answer questions for you as we go, we certainly will.

Rogier: Okay. Thank you, John. Yeah, so highlighted from the beginning, we mentioned single point of contact. It's is nothing new. It's been around for decades that term, but it's the way things are set up, right? We already discussed fixed versus bespoke service. So our inner workings, as I like to call it, is that you as a client of CSC Global connects with the dedicated client servicing team.

John mentioned that we have several hubs strategically located around the globe. Of course, by default, it's our headquartered office here in Wilmington, Delaware. But we also have our hub that we utilize in EMEA, which sits in London in the UK. And then we have our APAC hub, which sits in Bangalore, India. From there, we can actually cover all time zones worldwide, and we have the principle that we follow the sun. So your Australian or Japanese colleagues don't have to wait until the U.S. wakes up.

But that being said, if you look at the image more clearly, the CSC logo, which GSM falls under obviously, has a relationship manager, has a dedicated client servicing team. We also have in there executive management that oversees the relationship with the client and also taps into at least twice or if needed on a more frequent basis with the client to discuss service-level agreements and if there are additional efficiencies to be created. Plus if there are any other projects coming up, we would like to know in advance so we can anticipate creating a wider bandwidth within the team to cover that additional project. It could be post-M&A activities. A lot of corporate changes often need to be done after an M&A transaction. So we might carve out that as well.

You heard John saying that we provide our Annual Compliance package on a fixed fee basis as well as our transactional services if the scope is clear. So instead of coming to us for one service request at a time after an M&A transaction, we'd rather have a sit-down and discuss the projects at hand and price it as such.

Now when we look at the in-country subject matter experts or the lines that you see, we have regional coordinators that have a back-and-forth between the Knowledge Bank and the local offices just to populate that Knowledge Bank that our clients have access to as well through the dedicated client servicing team, as well as subject matter experts on the ground when needed.

So it's a very full, comprehensive service solution, and you often only see the tip of the iceberg. But this really highlights on how we are organized behind the scenes and how you can tap into best practices, the knowledge that's available, fact sheets of each of the jurisdictions about the type of entities that are common in those jurisdictions, what is your Annual Compliance package going to look like, and how bespoke can we service you in country as well.

Now when we look and we go back to technology, I lost my mouse for a second, here we go. And this comes from someone that has worked with other providers in the past, and, of course, coming from Intertrust, the entity management system was always something that I was jealous about. Thirty years ago I implemented a portal with a financial institution, and two years after that our competitor caught up with us at the time, and I was afraid that it would be just a copy and paste and move forward. Nothing is true about that statement. Even two years difference between originating a system and trying to copy it, you're behind the ball, especially in IT.

So having a system like our entity management system, that is 30 plus years in the making, is so robust that no other task management system or other proprietary system of other service providers out there can compare with, it's as good as it gets when it comes to corporate data tracking, users that can be added at no additional cost. And I know, John, you can speak much better to this award-winning system that I am. I speak from a non-biased position, as I was always very jealous about the system. But the ins and outs, John, please do go ahead and highlight some of the items there.

John: Well, I speak from a biased situation because I have loved in my close to 15 years of tenure here at CSC watching our technology be developed. And I think the most beneficial part of this is this statement. We develop our technology based on the direction that our clients ask to be serviced. We're not answering to shareholders here at CSC. We're answering to our clients, and we're doing so at no additional cost to our clients. We're here to make this as strong a solution as we can.

The key takeaways, in my opinion, and why this competes as a standalone technology against providers who only provide technology are the fact that we provide unlimited user access for no additional cost. There's no cost per seat license. You could permit local counsel in. You could permit your accountants in. There are no costs for that. With granular permissions available to you, so you can decide who can see what, who can do what, who can manage what within our technology.

The programmatic functions including the programmatic org charting truly set us apart and are one of the strengths of our system. The unlimited, all-you-can-eat structure when it comes to unlimited training, unlimited data, unlimited customization, unlimited documentation is really unheard of in this space. But the simple fact that our technology is not going to break the bank because this is not our only core service here at CSC. We've developed our technology to support our services, and we offer it at a cost-efficient cost for our clients. We do not need to sell this service for $100,000 a year. We need to provide a service that is going to bolster the service aspect of CSC and give you technology that is robust and is what our clients are looking for.

But the single biggest function that we're here to do is automatically capture our data for you in our technology. That's true, of course, for our U.S. domestic services, and that is as true as could be for our Global Subsidiary Management suite of services, true for bi-language documentation and true for all of the data points that are affected around the world, in real-time, automated capture of data and documentation, where you can log in and say, "I trust this data."

Rogier: Yeah. And that's when we talk about risk mitigation, you can indeed acquire this as a standalone solution, but we use it as our building blocks for our Global Subsidiary Management services as well. So if you have a dedicated client servicing team plus the Entity Management system at your fingertips, you truly mitigate your risk through a single global provider. Now you have heard throughout the presentation, the flexibility, the consistency in service delivery, it becomes really a bespoke service solution for our clients, and that's why this is working so well.

But like sometimes we are too biased to promote our own services. But we have enough clients that would like to speak with you all as well if you want to have a reference in whether it's the technology that we bring to the table or it's a global service solution.

John: Yeah. And that's true. So let's go ahead and share that. If anybody has questions, we're happy to take them. We're going to move on to Q&A here in a moment. We did have some questions come in to address. But there are your project managers, your customer relationship managers to use the right term. Here at CSC, you can reach out to anybody on our team, and we're always happy to share personal sessions with you. I join these calls. Rogier joins these calls and some other of our colleagues here are happy to join the calls. You're in great hands with the people you would work with. And if you're not sure who those people are, if you're not already a client of CSC, you could reach out to our general customer service and we will certainly steer you in the right direction to facilitate conversation.