What’s New with CSC Entity Management

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Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "What's New with CSC Entity Management." My name is Annie Triboletti. I will be kicking things off as your moderator today.

Joining us today are David Jefferis and Andrea Jonaitis. David is a senior director of product management specializing in Entity Management. And Andrea is one of our expert sales engineers also specializing in Entity Management. So with that, I would like to welcome David and Andrea.

Andrea: Hi, everyone. Good morning and good afternoon.

David: We're really excited for today's webinar. We appreciate everyone joining us today. We're going to jump right in. We've got a fair amount of content, and we have a lot of things that we want to actually demonstrate. So without further ado, let's take a look at today's agenda.

So we'll start with a single slide to talk about CSC as an organization, just a little bit of background. We'll spend a slide or two talking about just some terminology. When we talk about entity management, what do we mean? What are some of the reasons that organizations adopt this type of technology? And then really the focal point of today's webinar is talking about some of the latest capabilities in our platform, as well as a sneak preview, of sorts, of some of the enhancements that we're actively working on, a few that will go live later this year and a few that will go live towards the very beginning of next year. So we're quite excited to share some of those enhancements that are very near in terms of going live in the platform.

And then Andrea will take us through a live demonstration of CSC Entity Management. And then we'll also weave in a mock demonstration, where a couple of those features that are going live towards the end of the year, we've got some screenshots that we can kind of take you through to give you hopefully a good appreciation for how some of these new features will function in the platform later in the year.

And then we've got Q&A at the end. But certainly, as Andrea mentioned, there's a Q&A widget. So throughout the presentation, please fire away. As I am speaking, I know Andrea is always looking at the Q&A and vice versa. So we're trying to really do as best as we can in terms of answering those questions during the session. And if for some reason we're not able to address them during the webinar, we'll certainly look to follow up afterwards. And so let's dive in.

So let's talk for a moment about CSC as an organization. And so for those that are not familiar, there's a lot of stuff on this slide. A couple quick things I'll highlight, CSC is a global organization, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware. We do have a physical presence on five continents. We do offer services in over 140 jurisdictions. We are a privately held organization with roots that take us all the way back to 1899. So it was just a year ago that we were celebrating turning 125. But with so much ahead of us, it feels like we're still a young company.

We are very proud to say that over 90% of the Fortune 500 organizations utilize at least one service from CSC. And as it specifically relates to the CSC Entity Management platform that we'll explore in some detail today, we're quite proud to say that over 20% of the Fortune 500 are using CSC Entity Management as their legal entity management application.

To really sort of put a bow on it, we are the world's leading provider of compliance and business administration solutions. And so, again, just a little bit of a brief background on who CSC is as an organization.

So now let's get into some of our terminology and definitions. And really the reason that we have these couple of slides here is to make sure that we're kind of all on the same page.

So when we're talking about entity management, what does that mean? And so entity management is a number of things. So it is something that could be described as a practice or a discipline. So if you are in a corporate legal department, you might be tasked with the entity management of your legal subsidiaries, keeping them in compliance, handling filing obligations, etc., tracking information, documents.

And then, certainly, we have organizations that will reach out and say, "Hey, CSC, I'm interested in your entity management services." And what they sometimes mean is we're looking to maybe name you as a registered agent, have you prepare and file annual reports on our behalf, maybe not only here in the U.S., but we also offer global compliance services, corporate secretarial services, where we handle annual compliance and ad hoc filings internationally, again, in over 140 jurisdictions.

And so those things can certainly be described as entity management, but for the purposes of today's webinar, when we say entity management, what we're really referring to is software, purpose-built software that is designed to help legal practitioners do the things they need to do, so track entity information, things like directors and officers, ownership records, be able to generate structure charts that create visualization around how your entities come together from an ownership standpoint. Be able to run reports on your legal entities and track compliance obligations that are critical to maintaining the good standing health of your legal entities, which could be in various states or in various countries around the globe. And so what you're seeing here on the slide, these are just sort of the fundamental building blocks of what you would expect to find in an entity management solution.

Now if you're not using a platform, and quite often, as many as maybe half the time or more when we're talking with organizations, they don't have a purpose-built, off-the-shelf entity management system. They're using things like spreadsheets and shared drives and doing their best to stay on top of their compliance obligations and keep their information together. But it's really, really challenging.

And so this slide talks about some of the challenges that you're going to run into. And I think primarily organizations that don't have a system like this find that they don't have what is often described as a source of truth. There's not one place where they can go and say this is the definitive source of my legal entity names and their appointments, i.e., directors and officers, and the ownership records, and the underlying documents, like articles and bylaws and consents that kind of memorialize actions and sort of the charter documents of the legal entity. And so they struggle as a consequence. And in many cases, they find themselves where they reach a breaking point, where maybe it's because of an acquisition or some organic growth, where they just sort of can't make it happen or work the way they used to as things start to not scale for them due to inefficiencies.

And so what you'll also see here on the slide is that modern solutions are going to go beyond just being a repository or a central place where you can store information. They are going to offer you the ability to very flexibly configure these platforms to track information that is unique to your organization. They're going to create efficiencies by automating things, like clicking a button to generate a structure chart or clicking a button to create documents or see compliance filings. So again, automation, information flowing into the system, and having efficiencies through these types of modern systems, having again at a glance analytics and reporting at your fingertips.

And then the last bullet point, which we think is really important, is that these modern systems can create or provide what we call integrations with other systems. So while your entity software should certainly be the source of truth for your legal entity information, you probably have a tax system and an accounting system and other sorts of systems within your organization that you might benefit from feeding data to in terms of entity management information. And there certainly may be a benefit to having those other systems push data into your entity system, like pushing tax IDs or SAP codes or things of that nature. And so in this day and age, the technology exists such that you can have these ongoing, secure conversations where these platforms can share information to create efficiencies and reduce risk that comes with manual data entry and trying to manage data into places, which is never a good governance practice.

So that's just a bit of a backdrop in terms of what we mean by entity management software and some of the benefits or reasons why organizations adopt this type of technology.

Andrea: So this, first of all, let me take a step back. CSC offers a variety of technology solutions for our customers. So if you are a registered agent customer, or if you partner with CSC for Global Subsidiary Management services, you may have access already to a basic portal where we do include basic entity vitals and documents will flow automatically into the system as part of our partnership together.

The CSC Entity Management platform is a premium function or a premium technology for managing your corporate governance and compliance needs. So these features if you don't have them today, it's possible that you're not a subscriber to CSC's Entity Management solution. And this is a high-level overview of the various features and capabilities that CSC Entity Management can bring to the table for you.

I do want to highlight and kind of reinforce that the platform is more than just a collection of features. It is very thoughtfully designed and very purpose-built in the way that we carefully selected the capabilities and the features that we bring to the table. So we want this to be a technology that is very intuitive and easy for you to use, serving as a one-stop shop for all things related to your entity compliance and maintenance. David used the term centralized source of truth. And that's really what we're striving for across all of these functional areas of compliance.

So, of course, you can manage things like entity and data elements from basic entity details and officer, director, member, manager appointments all the way over to shareholders and ownership structures. The system supports an unlimited number of custom data fields across a variety of modular areas so that you're able to track pretty much anything that's important for you. It is heavily configurable. So not only does it have that purpose-built kind of features and fields by design, but you have the flexibility to add your own configurations and customizations in terms of those fields and details yourself.

We do give you the ability, of course, to upload a variety of documents into the platform so that you're able to utilize this as that centralized repository for an unlimited number of documents. We streamline the process of finding documents with built-in optical character recognition and full text searching built into the process as well. Beyond basic document storage, we have a document generation feature, which enables our customers to create and store documents and document templates and to follow a simple, guided workflow to be able to generate one or many documents in a bulk project.

We have integrations, kind of off-the-shelf integrations as well as the ability to integrate with other applications. So the system is integrated with Docusign electronic signature for the circulation of documents and easy routing back into the filing cabinet. If you use Workday Human Capital Management system, we have an integration there with our officer or director or appointment tracking system.

There's also the ability to streamline org charts, whether they're graphic or text-based org charts. The visualization of your portfolio ownership is automated within our technology with that built-in org chart tool, where you can build org charts with just a couple clicks of a button.

Arguably, one of the most important parts or aspects of your entity management solution is going to be the management of deadlines, filing requirements, and organization-wide requirements to remain in good standing with your entities. Our software automatically calendars U.S. secretary of state deadlines just based on the entities and the jurisdictions where you're listed as formed or doing business, so that you have a tracking grid display that's built into our tool so that you're able to manage those deadlines. And CSC, as your partner, can also manage deadlines within that calendaring function on your behalf.

We can provide the same level of automation with our Global Subsidiary Management services as we proactively handle the compliance needs of entities in over 140 jurisdictions around the globe.

There's plenty of other features that we'll take a look at. But we also want to show you a live look at the software at the end of our session together. So I think that that will really bring into focus the power of the application.

And speaking of power, while we're referring to the Entity Management solution bringing a robust suite of pre-built, kind of meaningful features and capabilities that can be used in a self-service capacity, you'll find that the solution becomes even more powerful when it's paired with CSC's compliance solutions. We will automate the upkeep of data and documents within the Entity Management tool when you leverage CSC as your registered agent, a global subsidiary or SPV or fund partner. So you'll find that that definitely becomes even more powerful than just managing the system on your own.

That segues us into this slide, which is what makes CSC Entity Management different. I think when it comes to entity management software, you'll generally find that the collection of features that are available are more or less the same. Entity management solutions provide very similar features and functionalities, but there are very certain and specific nuances that can set aside an entity management solution from one provider or another.

One of the most critical distinctions between CSC Entity Management and others is the combination of that industry-leading technology with our tenured and experienced customer support. CSC is very unique. We are not just a technology company and not just a services company, but really a pairing of the two. And we're proud to be a leader across both of those areas so that we can help to make portfolio maintenance easier for our customers by automating the technology with all of those various service offerings.

It also really makes us quite satisfied when customers tell us that our Entity Management technology is incredibly intuitive, provides very valuable features and actionable data that can help streamline your processes or make your jobs easier. Really, no one wants to use a technology that is difficult to navigate or cumbersome to keep up to date. You're just not going to use that technology if you have those types of challenges. So any opportunity that we have to increase the functionality of our technology or to make things better, easier, or faster for you, we are definitely going to take those opportunities to make your jobs again easier, faster, better, and bring a layer of security that is unparalleled.

One of the most critical distinctions between CSC Entity Management and others is, again, kind of our approach to security. So our technology is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and certified. We undergo regular tests, penetration tests, ethical hacking. We have a team of specialists that are dedicated only to security, data protection, availability, and ensuring that we're able to meet and exceed the security requirements of even our toughest clients.

We are extremely dedicated to our Entity Management software, and we strive to continue to invest in our technology and to release new, meaningful features that are going to, again, make things better and easier for you. We have a multi-year roadmap, and we release enhancements regularly. We include those enhancements at no cost, so that we can continue to grow the tool and bring additional value because we know that your needs will change over time and we want to make sure that our software changes and evolves over time as well.

And the flat-rate annual subscription includes all the things that you need to be successful. So it's going to include all of those enhancements and upgrades. You don't need to pay more money. You don't have to install anything. There's no process you have to go through. You don't have to opt in to a better package or a tier. It's not à la carte features. You just get all of the technology and all of the features.

It also includes unlimited users, with various role-based permissions, whether users have read-only access, whether they have edit capabilities, whether they have no visibility or access to certain entities or certain functions. You also can have users that are outside of your group if that makes sense for you. And that's going to include unlimited training and support of all of those users. Again, whether they're internal to your team or outside of your group, we're going to train and support those people.

So this is a brief look. I mentioned a moment ago that we include all of the enhancements, and here's a snapshot of some of the enhancements that have been released over the last few years. I'm not going to get into a tremendous amount of detail on each one of these. But I hope that you'll notice that we are extremely committed to enhancing all aspects of our Entity Management solution across all of these functional areas, whether it's enhancing the org chart functions, streamlining your processes by integrating with Docusign or with Workday Human Capital Management, or giving you the tools to build or design documents and document templates right inside of the application.

We're constantly taking your thoughts and your feedback and suggestions, and those suggestions are really what drive our multi-year roadmap. So we take a look at the features that are being requested, and based on that demand or those requirements, we are releasing new and improved capabilities to the enhancement on a regular basis, generally about three or four times per year on average. We're about to dive into a live demo of the technology. But I do want to briefly take you through just a couple of the most recent enhancements that we have released to the Entity Management solution.

So the first one I want to share with you is the Bulk Import Module. This came out in a couple different phases. So in the first iteration of Bulk Import, we previously, outside of the Bulk Import option, offered customers the ability to create entities or to mass update individual data fields kind of one at a time across many entities. We recognized that customers often wanted to mass update more than one field at a time across many entities, or even have the ability to import entities and data and information into the system. So you'll also perhaps know that CSC automatically populates entity data and documents as part of our services. But again, some customers may want to add those types of elements or entities or data points on their own outside of CSC and the way that we automate that with our services or through migration services.

So this first phase of the Bulk Import Module enhancement gave customers the ability to add non-CSC entities into the platform in a bulk fashion. So if CSC is not serving as your partner, but you have entities or properties or other types of entities that you wanted to add into the system, now you have a mechanism for kind of bulk importing them into the platform, regardless of whether CSC is managing them. We also gave you the ability to add or modify entity vitals and details on the entity summary page for any of those entities, whether they are CSC managed entities or other entities that you've added into the platform.

This Bulk Import feature gives you the ability to prepare an import file via Excel, or you can enter information directly into the import grid in a manual fashion, or you could copy and paste the data into that in-app grid. And import templates make that process easier. And the Bulk Import History will give you the capability to understand if these imports were successful and to give you the opportunity to make any corrections or additions, if needed, as well to those bulk imports that you have imported into the system.

The second phase of the Bulk Import Module added the ability for you to also manage or maintain officer or director details. So the first iteration was just specific to entity vitals on the entity summary page. The second phase included the ability to add new or existing officer or director appointments to one or many entities across the portfolio. You can add additional titles to existing officers and directors. You can maintain appointment attributes, and you can modify appointment level custom fields. I'm going to show you a demo of this inside of our live demo. So I won't belabor these slides too much, but I did want to share at least a couple of the details there.

We also have some future releases of the Bulk Import Module that are going to include some support for other data areas as well as some other functional capabilities. So a little teaser there. You'll hear a little bit more from David about some of that later in our presentation.

The last item that I want to wrap up with, in terms of recent enhancements that we have released to the Entity Management tool, includes the inbound API. So without getting overly technical, an application program interface or an API allows two platforms to communicate to one another and to share information back and forth. And David gave kind of an example there, where he was talking about the tax systems that you may already have or you may have accounting systems and software.

Previously, the API that we had with CSC's Entity Management solution was what's called outbound in nature, meaning that data stored within CSC Entity Management could be fed into other applications, like tax software or again your accounting system. But we were previously not able to take information in from those other applications. So this bidirectional or this inbound API opened up the ability for an inbound feed of information from those other systems into CSC Entity Management. So you, again, have that source of truth for your SAP codes, or you have your Yardi codes, and those are stored in other technologies.

While CSC Entity Management can and should be your source of truth for all of your legal entity information, we recognize that you've already taken the time to populate that data within those other systems. So now rather than duplicating data or having to re-key data or enter it manually into the Entity Management solution, the inbound application allows us to connect to your accounting software, your Yardi system, or other types of applications and to just pull that information into CSC Entity Management so that you don't have to waste time or duplicate efforts. So that bidirectional API opens the door to endless possibilities in terms of data that could flow between CSC Entity Management and those other applications that are assisting you in other areas of your business.

So that's just a bit about our most recent enhancements. David and I thought it would be really interesting and that you might appreciate getting a little bit of insider information about where CSC Entity Management is headed. So we are actually going to transition, and David is going to turn our discussion to a preview of some items from our roadmap which are due to be released in the near future. So David, let's go back to you.

David: Yeah, thank you Andrea. And so there are a lot of items on the roadmap, but we thought we would today focus on the features that we are actively building that are going live very soon. So we've got three upgrades slated to go live before year end and then two that are slated to go live at the very beginning of next year. So that'll be what we focus on. But rest assured, there is more on the roadmap that will come down the line a little bit later.

So with that as a bit of a backdrop, the next enhancement that we're anticipating for November is a direct pre-built integration with Companies House. And so a moment ago, Andrea was talking about our API capabilities, right, the ability to essentially feed information from one system to another. And the entity API does have this broad framework to support really any type of custom integration, sort of name a system and the framework is there to enable that type of secure feed of information back and forth.

But there are also what we call pre-built integrations, ones that basically we've already done the heavy lifting on. They're kind of ready to go. You just have to kind of turn on and unlock the features. So we have a pre-built integration with Docusign for electronic signature workflow. As I think Andrea noted, we've got that pre-built integration with Workday. So if that's your human capital management system and you're using our entity platform, we can create in-app alerts and email alerts if there are personnel changes in Workday that might affect your officer/director appointments that you're managing in our entity system. And then also, for publicly traded companies that have a Section 16 filing obligation with the SEC, we have a pre-built integration with the SEC's EDGAR database for Section 16 filings.

And then the latest and greatest pre-built, off-the-shelf integration, slated to go live next month, is an integration with Companies House. So if there are folks on the line that have U.K. companies, this name rings a bell. This is the business registry. So if you have a U.K. entity, it would be registered with Companies House. And so what we are building here, to be clear, is a self-service tool.

Now earlier in our webinar, Andrea was kind of talking about our global services. We have a suite of services that we call Global Subsidiary Management, where effectively you can, for lack of a better term, outsource the ongoing management of those entities from a corporate secretarial standpoint to CSC. This is a little bit different. This would be a case of where you have U.K. entities, but you're not looking to have a provider take over the ongoing compliance filings. You want to do that yourself.

And so what's going live, again next month, is a Filing Centre module that will support initially just the annual confirmation statement filing, which is kind of equivalent to the annual report here in the U.S. Now on the heels of this, we will be developing additional filing support. So we'll have things like director changes and PSC changes, etc. We'll talk about that in just a moment.

But the initial launch gives us the annual confirmation statement filing. This will be a guided workflow, where you can work your way through the filing form. We'll have a comparison report, where effectively you can see what data is on file with Companies House versus the data that you're maintaining about that U.K. entity inside of our CSC Entity Management platform, and then make updates as necessary. You'll be able to then leverage the data in Entity Management by pulling it directly into the annual confirmation statement filing form, and then file it directly with Companies House in the U.K. And then you get real- time tracking status visibility, was it accepted, was it rejected. Those sorts of in-app kind of status tracking notices are available.

And then also, our Good Standing Calendar will create an event to let you know when the next annual confirmation statement filing is due, which would be essentially the anniversary of when the filing was submitted. So that's all getting ready to go live next month.

And then, if you are someone that pays attention to this sort of thing, there was some news recently where Companies House has made a few modifications to the annual confirmation statement filing process. And most notably, there is now an identity verification requirement for individuals that serve as directors and what are known as persons with significant control, often called PSCs. And the short story here is that individuals need to register for these personal identification codes and include them in the annual confirmation statement filing if they've not been previously submitted to Companies House. So the short story here is that our filing tool will support the ability to plug in those personal codes and submit them as a part of your annual confirmation statement filing because you need to be able to do that, right? So that's a part of what we're incorporating into our design that's getting ready to go live.

Now after we go live with the Companies House integration, in the December time frame, we're looking at two exciting org chart enhancements. We've got a slide here on each one, but then we'll actually do a mock demo in a little bit. So I'll try to be concise here.

But today, and Andrea will give you a run-through of our org chart capabilities, you can easily run an org chart that shows you what does my org structure look like as of this moment and what did it look like at some point in the past. That's something that you can do currently. This feature is going to allow you to create hypothetical scenario modeling. We call it org chart modeling, where what if we were to, and then kind of fill in the blank, form a new entity, acquire a set of entities, do a merger, dissolve something out of existence. And so on screen, and we'll kind of do a mock demo of this in a bit, you can really kind of model out those changes and effectively what that would look like in your ownership structure and then save that and share it either internally or externally as you see fit. So that's what we call org chart modeling, kind of working on those hypotheticals on screen.

And then we also have this additional ownership visibility. So today, in our platform, if you want you can run an org chart that is truly comprehensive in nature, where it pulls in every legal entity that has an ownership relationship. We also support the ability to run what we call entity-specific org charts, where effectively you're saying, "I don't want to see the whole thing. Maybe that's more than I want to bite off at the moment. I want to define what we call a root entity. I want to name a company and have the org chart go up or down or both at the same time. Let me really kind of hone in on a single entity." And when you choose to go that route, it becomes what we describe as a line-of-sight org chart. You're able to look up and down, but it's very much within the line of sight of that so-called root entity that you defined.

In some cases, our clients have entities that are a little bit off to the side, that helps sort of create a more complete ownership picture. And so we'll demonstrate the ability, that's coming ready in a couple months, that will allow you to actually pull in more owners when you're running those entity-specific charts.

Now this is like burying the headline. This should have been at the top of the webinar. I should have mentioned it when we went through the agenda. But we have some AI features that are getting ready to go live, potentially as early as January of next year. And so we know that AI is an incredibly hot topic in this industry and really any industry. And so before I describe these AI features and there's more in the works to follow, I do want to mention that we are building this in a very thoughtful manner such that our clients' data will maintain its privacy and security. We are not training a model that feeds your data to other clients and vice versa. So this is a very thoughtful implementation that's very controlled in terms of how we're going to be using artificial intelligence.

What I'll also mention is that we are going to create a mechanism where, as an organization, if you're not quite ready to adopt artificial intelligence out of any concerns you might have, there'll be an opt-out mechanism where you can effectively say we're not ready to tap into those types of features. But if you ever do become ready, again that's a flag that we can change, and then you can start to leverage these capabilities.

So today in CSC Entity Management, you absolutely can upload multiple documents at a time. However, to be candid, you would have to upload those multiple documents to a single destination, which is likely a folder tied to an entity.

This is going to tear those walls down. And so you could upload multiple documents into a staging area. Maybe the first document belongs to Company A, the next one is Company B, the fifth one is Company Z, and they might belong to different folders. So one document might be best suited in an articles folder. Another document should maybe live in a bylaws or a minutes folder. And so basically, we're going to make this as efficient as possible, where you upload multiple documents to a staging area, and then if you do opt to leverage the AI component, the AI engine will read the documents very quickly and make recommendations in terms of the entities and folders that these documents ought to be routed to inside of the platform. You can either adopt the AI recommendation or deviate from it if you feel that there's a better entity or folder where that document should live. So that's the first feature.

The next feature that we anticipate going live at the same time, again early next year, is an executive summary capability, where instead of having to open a document and skim through it or read through it, you basically can click a button and say, "AI, give me an executive CliffsNotes summary of what is this document about." And so again, a user action that will allow you to get that quick summary of any of the documents that you're uploading into the Entity Management platform. So we're very excited about that as well.

Again, more enhancements to follow, but these are the ones that are being worked on literally as we speak.