Beyond Registered Agent: CSC’s Compliance Suite Showcase

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, "Beyond Registered Agent: CSC Compliance Showcase." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today are David Jefferis and Andrea Jonaitis. David is a senior director of product management for Global Compliance and Government Services at CSC in the Wilmington, Delaware headquarters. David is responsible for driving the strategic direction of CSC's compliance solutions. With CSC for over 15 years, he has significant experience providing training, implementation, and consultative services to clients with CSC Entity Management. Andrea is a product manager in the Corporate and Legal Solutions Group at CSC. Since joining CSC in 2017, Andrea has specialized in global subsidiary management and entity management, working with prospects to present an accurate and clear scope of services, including helping subsidiaries stay in compliance as well as demonstrating CSC Entity Management.

And with that, let's welcome David and Andrea.

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

David: Thank you so much. We're very excited to have you as part of our audience today for our webinar where we're really going to go beyond registered agent. It is perhaps the service that organizations know us best for, and that's fair because we've been providing that service for over a century I suppose at this point. That said, really the focal point of today's webinar is going to really talk about some of the additional services that we can layer on top of registered agent.

So let's start first with our agenda. It's pretty jam-packed. So we're going to talk for a moment about CSC as an organization. We recognize that there are some folks that are joining us today that currently work with CSC, and we certainly appreciate your business. But I think there are some folks that are maybe exploring our services, so we want to talk a little bit about CSC as a company. We've gone through some very recent growth that's very exciting that we'll talk about. I want to spend a moment talking about the industry landscape, kind of what's happening in the world of compliance.

We will quickly define the role of a registered agent, which I think most people are familiar with, but just to make sure we're all on the same page we'll talk briefly about what a registered agent fundamentally does. And then really the focal point, as I mentioned earlier, of today's webinar is to go beyond that. So we're going to focus specifically on a number of services, annual reports, business licenses, what we call global subsidiary management, which is a suite of global corporate secretarial services. We'll talk about Entity Management, which is near and dear to my heart and Andrea's heart as well, and then we'll also talk a bit about service of process and what we're calling Enterprise Legal Management.

You'll also notice on the agenda we have a demo. So how are we going to fit this all in? I guess we'll find out together because there's a lot of slide content, but we want to make sure that we can also squeeze in a live demonstration of a number of these capabilities as well. And then, as we noted, we'll look to have some time at the end for Q&A. But please don't feel like you've got to wait to the end. Take advantage of that Q&A widget, fire off your questions as they come to mind, and then we'll try to address them throughout the presentation and then leave some time at the end as well.

So that is our agenda. Let's talk a little bit about CSC as a company. And if you've joined us for webinars in the past, you might say, well, gosh, this slide looks maybe a little bit different than what I'm accustomed to seeing. And so let's just talk for a moment about CSC as an organization.

We are globally headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware. We are a privately held organization. We're able to proudly trace our roots all the way back to 1899 when the company began. We're the largest U.S.-owned registered agent. We're also the largest registered agent by market share. I mentioned that that's what we're very well known for. We're very proud to say that over 90% of the Fortune 500 utilize CSC for at least one of our compliance services.

What looks perhaps different about this slide, if you haven't joined us for a little while, is the exciting news that, back in November of last year, CSC acquired the Intertrust Group. And so the combination of these organizations really creates a preeminent provider of global business administration and compliance solutions. Our combined history is actually over 200 years, and we have an incredible amount of industry experience, a strong reputation, and really a dedication to superior client service. As one company, we have now over 7,000 employees. We've really doubled the size of our organization from a headcount perspective, and we have capabilities across over 140 different international jurisdictions. So our global reach has expanded really dramatically in terms of the number of countries where we have a physical presence.

Our mission within this part of the organization for many years has been to become really an indispensable compliance partner, where we combine really compelling technology, world-class service, and integrate those things together and provide really actionable information to our customers through our technology platform. So that's a little bit about CSC as an organization.

Now when you talk about CSC Solutions, this is a little bit of an eye chart, no offense to our friends in marketing who put this slide together. I don't envy them. But we have an incredible depth and breadth of services that we offer well beyond registered agent, and this slide attempts to sort of bundle them into some logical categories, including capital markets, fund solutions. We have an entire business line around domains and online security. But really the focus for Andrea and myself today is going to be around what we have grouped under business administration and compliance, in terms of things like entity management, global management of entities, and of course business licenses, enterprise legal management. And then certainly we'll talk a little bit about kind of the transactional side of our business, where organizations are engaging us on a daily basis to handle filings around their corporate entities, which we do as again a core part of our operation as a registered agent as well.

So again, a lot of services here. More than we could possibly tackle in an hour webinar. So we're going to focus really on a handful of our core compliance services that complement registered agent.

Andrea: So with that said, we're kind of moving into the current market environment, which is very similar across all of these various business areas. There are a lot of services and technologies that are required to maintain a corporate portfolio really regardless of the size, and it's very easy to understand some of the challenges and pain points that are associated with having multiple providers across all of these services and technology. So this slide might go without saying, but we've outlined just a few of the challenges of using multiple providers across each of these business areas — registered agent, annual reports, business licensing, and so forth.

So first you've got multiple contacts. Dealing with many points of contact can make managing your vendors a full-time job. It can magnify your attrition risk. It also can become challenging for your partners or vendors to have a clear and complete scope of what your needs might be when services are disjointed or provided by multiple vendors or partners.

On top of that is a fragmented tech stack, which could be disastrous to any organization, with no single source of truth for data or documents, lack of communication between these systems, maybe lack of controls and reconciliation across multiple technologies. Also this breeds likely a surplus of inefficiencies that could have been better addressed through a centralized technology adoption with the right service provider.

Arguably one of the most significant and frustrating challenges with having multiple providers is inconsistent service and varying SLAs. Predictability is paramount when it comes to avoiding unpleasant surprises. So being able to have an expectation of what you'll receive from each and every vendor or partner you're working with is crucial, and you'll get the same level of service when one partner provides services across all areas.

Finally, there's cost. Your organization is much more likely to realize pricing efficiencies when these services are bundled together or centralized within one single vendor or provider here.

So that is going to bring us into some of the other challenges as it relates to managing these various business areas. The main challenge faced by legal entity management teams is competing priorities within the organization, followed by a lack of bandwidth. A trend that was seen for a number of years is this idea of cost cutting, where corporate legal departments are being expected to somehow do more and produce more with fewer and fewer resources. And what we're seeing here is that these corporate legal departments are looking to their service and technology partners to help them to find those efficiencies, efficiencies in time, efficiencies in costs.

This concept of do more with less really stands true across all of our subject areas today, again as it relates to business licensing, global entity management, service of process, or legal enterprise management. These competing priorities can be very problematic, not just across these various disciplines, but even inside of them. It can be really hard to understand where to focus your time and energy.

So we're going to dig into each of these disciplines briefly, again providing as much information about them and how CSC can help you. So David is going to kick us off with registered agent services.

David: Absolutely. And so, again, the focal point of the webinar is to kind of go beyond registered agent, but certainly I think it makes sense to define that to make sure that we all have sort of a clear understanding around what are the primary roles and responsibilities of a registered agent, which again we're not running from that. That's been a hallmark and a core service for CSC for so long.

So let's talk about sort of legally speaking what does a registered agent do. So a registered agent is an individual or a third party responsible for accepting court paperwork and other legal documents. And so the terminology that we use is service of process. We sometimes call that SOP because we do love our acronyms.

And service of process is often litigation, but not necessarily. It's really just the commencement of a legal action. So that could be a garnishment. It could be a subpoena, something that might not rise to the level of actual litigation. But these are, again, court documents that, as a registered agent, we would handle, receive process on your behalf, and make sure that they are distributed securely and electronically to the appropriate points of contact within your organization.

There's also certainly an entity compliance aspect to acting as a registered agent as well. Typically a registered agent is going to provide some level of insight into events such as annual reports that would be coming due that would impact the compliance or the so-called good standing of your companies as well. So it is sort of a very specific function, where it's a statutory appointment where the agent is on file as your sort of addresses of record with the secretary of state or a similar issuing office handling legal documents and then again providing some insight into when there are compliance obligations that would impact the good standing status of your company.

So that is the somewhat limited, narrow definition of what a registration does as a core function.

Now, of course, we've been in this business for a long time, and we understand that portfolios of companies and licenses are not static, but rather they are incredibly dynamic. And so the slide that we're seeing here is meant to provide a little bit of visibility to what we'll call the compliance life cycle.

You are on occasion forming entities. You might be registering existing entities into new jurisdictions. You might be going into new lines of business. Maybe you're acquiring companies, dissolving, withdrawing, etc. And all of these changes, which sometimes are happening constantly, sometimes it's more ebbs and flows and fits and starts, but at the end of the day, all of these compliance changes will impact things like annual report obligations, business license requirements. If you're a global organization or expanding to become a global organization, then you're bringing on a whole host of new challenges and the need for knowledge and understanding of the variance of compliance, which is certainly different from one jurisdiction to the next around the globe.

And so again, it really becomes a situation, as Andrea mentioned, where organizations are really looking for partners to be able to gain efficiencies, to gain knowledge and advice and expertise in terms of how to manage all the complexities that come along with the life cycle of changes that will happen over time within your portfolio of companies that you're managing.

So how can CSC help? There are so many ways that we can help, and again we're going to talk a lot about our services around annual reports and entity management and more. But really we wanted to kind of take a step back and think about what makes us different as a service provider versus maybe some of the other registered agents on the market.

We've already talked a little bit about the fact that the breadth and depth of our services is something that we're again very proud of. We think it makes us incredibly unique. Our global presence, especially with the acquisition of the Intertrust Group, is really expansive. It sort of a follow-the-sun model of being able to support organizations wherever they're located in the world.

We have for many, many years put a lot of effort into ensuring that the services that we offer, whether that's filing annual reports or forming entities or renewing business licenses as another example, that the services that we offer are automatically integrated with the technology platforms that we offer. So there's complete transparency, oversight, visibility, and automation really for our customers where they can log in to our technology solutions and have a clear understanding, a clear picture, and confidence in the work that we're performing on their behalf. We also work very, very hard to ensure that our platforms are intuitive. It's somewhat simple to build a system that's complicated. It's much more challenging, from a development standpoint, to build something that is really easy for people to use.

And so we've really, as almost like a North Star, we've prided ourselves on making sure that as we build new features in our platforms that they are very simple to use, not only for power users that are in the system day in day out working in the application but also for users that are maybe more casual, that are logging in every so often to locate information. And we want to make sure that our solutions can really be self-service so that folks in your organization, let's say you're an administrator in one of our technology platforms that they are able to just work in the system and they don't have to come to you for every single question and for every single piece of information or documentation that they require.

We have invested a tremendous amount of money and blood, sweat, and tears into the security and availability of our solutions. And so we go through annual audits from a security standpoint. Third parties stress test the security. And again there's a tremendous amount of thought and effort that goes into that as well as business continuity planning to ensure that if the unforeseen occurs, that we can restore and make our services available in a very highly available and scalable fashion.

And then also there's been a sustained investment from the top of the company on down from senior leadership in terms of continuing to evolve and improve our technology platforms. And so specifically, when we get deeper in the presentation, when we start talking about entity management, which is where I focus most of my efforts, we can talk quite a bit about recent enhancements and some things that are in the works as well.

So we feel that these are some of the factors that make CSC unique and different than sort of your average registered agent in the marketplace. So now I get to turn things back over to Andrea, and one of her areas of expertise is annual reports. And so she's going to talk a little bit about this, what is it and what are some of the solutions that CSC can bring to the table.

Andrea: Absolutely. Thanks, David. So David was mentioning kind of some factors that can play a role in an entity's good standing, and one of the most critical factors is the completion of the annual reports. Annual reports are required by the state to maintain good entity standing in most jurisdictions. And these can be identified with a variety of names. They could be statement of information, occupational tax reports. They could be annual lists or franchise tax reports. Regardless of whatever these reports are called in each jurisdiction, don't let the name fool you. Some of them may not actually be due every year. The due dates of these reports can vary based on an entity's registration date, fiscal year end, or could simply just be a date assigned by the local jurisdiction for example. So these nuances and differences by jurisdiction can really complicate tracking these deadlines, staying on top of your dates and deadlines, and even retaining the knowledge of the filing requirements and kind of what's included or not included in each of these jurisdictions.

These reports also require ample maintenance of data. So to complete a report, you'll need access to a variety of entity vitals. You'll need D&O or member-manager details and information. And of course, these filings require time, time that certainly could be better spent or utilized for a host of other responsibilities that you have.

Most importantly, the failure to complete these reports, regardless of the frequency that they're due, it can have significant consequences. Not only can you find your entity in a negative status, such as dormant or delinquent. You may eventually get to a point where you become revoked. And getting back into good standing can be an extremely expensive and time-consuming process, and really no one wants to pay unnecessary taxes, penalties, and interest. Just prefer to do it right the first time and keep it maintained.

So again that leads us into how can CSC help. Well, we really will have you covered every step of the way as it relates to these annual reports, from pre-filing services all the way through your post-filing visibility and reporting.

So initially, CSC completes an audit of the status of all entities. Understanding the statuses within each jurisdiction and the filing requirements to stay in good standing for each of those jurisdictions, we will proactively prepare and file annual reports and franchise tax reports on your behalf. Sometimes if we may need additional information from you, we'll work with you to understand the data updates that are needed so that we can always ensure that we're submitting the most accurate reports.

We also maintain that data for you. We maintain entity vitals and D&O details and member-manager appointments within our CSCNavigator platform for easy reference or reuse in the future. And upon completion of your annual reports, certified copies of those reports and the corresponding evidence received from the state for those reports gets automatically uploaded into the CSCNavigator platform. Each document is linked to the proper entity within our technology so that you can easily review and have 24/7 access to those documents.

We also maintain what's called a good standing or compliance calendar in the CSCNavigator system so that, in real time, you'll always know the status of your annual report filings, how that process is going, where reports have been completed versus those that are in flight. We give you that real-time visibility so you can understand our services to you.

Lastly, the secretary of state good standing status is visible at the jurisdiction level for each of your entities within the CSCNavigator platform, which ensures complete transparency of all of your registrations and statuses. We'll even proactively notify you if anything changes regarding your entity statuses. So again, during these times of doing more with less, we're here, CSC is here to free you from that burden of managing these reports so that you can focus your time on more important areas.

Another section where we strive for automation and peace of mind for organizations is the maintenance of your business licenses. So let's get into our next topic.

David: Sure, absolutely. And so, Andrea, you were talking about some of the complexities of annual reports, where again it could be based on an anniversary of when an entity registered in the state or based on the entity type or the fiscal year end. So there certainly is complexity there. But at the end of the day, I can wrap my brain around the fact that I've got a filing due with a secretary of state or equivalent office.

When I start thinking about business licenses, my head does explode just a little bit because if you look at the slide, you'll see that there are over 160,000 licensing authorities. So we're not just talking about an entity that has a compliance filing due at the state level in the case of the U.S. subsidiary or at the country levels if we're talking about an international company. Now we're talking about just sort of mind-boggling complexity of all these different authorities, which could be at sort of the city level, the township level, the town level. It's really kind of a lot to process in my mind. And so again so much of it now comes down to things like the particular vertical that you're in. If it's insurance, if you're in a contractor business, if you're have licenses maybe you're a restaurant, there's a liquor license, there's an elevator license. It sort of goes on and on and on infinitum. And so it's really challenging for a lot of organizations to understand based on our particular line of business, based on where we're doing business, what actually is due.

And so you run into sort of situations where, in some cases, organizations are under-licensed because they just don't have everything that is actually required, which puts the business certainly at risk. There are some pretty severe penalties for failure to have proper licensure. And then there's also some cases where sometimes people are overdoing it, where just through lack of understanding in some cases they might have more licenses than are actually required for the particular line of business. So this is again very challenging.

And then another one of the internal, I think, struggles that some of our clients talk to us about before they engage us for these services is that it's common, especially for mid to large size organizations, where you have one team that's maybe responsible for the entity compliance around things like service of process and your portfolio entity management and maybe a different person or a different set of individuals that are responsible for the business license compliance. And there's often a lot of overlap in terms of information that needs to be shared, and sometimes that coordination becomes a little bit of a challenge, again sort of harkening back to, Andrea, what you talked about one of the benefits of having a single provider is again one place to go, a technology platform where you can kind of see everything together. And so I think this is one of the great examples of where again partnering with CSC for entity compliance and business license compliance can make a tremendous amount of sense.

So what actually are the services that CSC offers around business licenses? And it's really a pretty broad array of things that we can do. So one of the things that we're able to offer is research. So I mentioned that sometimes it's challenging to understand if you have enough or the right licenses or if you're over-licensed.

So maybe you're opening up a new location. What licenses are required? Maybe you're wondering about an existing location. Do we have the proper licenses? Are they current? Are there other licenses that you should also have? Maybe there have been some changes where maybe you've done an entity name change, director-officer changes, and maybe as a consequence should we be amending some of our licenses?

So one of the big buckets of the offering, so to speak, around business licenses is just that fundamental research that we can do to make sure that you have the appropriate set of licenses based on again your unique set of entities and the types of businesses that you perform. And so again, we conduct research at the jurisdiction level, which again thousands of licensing authorities, to provide a detailed report to let you know what licenses are actually relevant. So then we have a team of experts that would identify any non-compliance, that would uncover any under or over-licensure based on your industry type and your business activities. And then you can avoid the worst penalty of all, which is closures and sort of other financial penalties that could occur if you're not in a proper standing from a license perspective.

Perhaps our most popular service, these are all popular, but one of our most popular services is what we call Business License Outsourcing, which really is a parallel to some of the annual report services that Andrea described a moment ago, where effectively you're saying, beyond just letting me know what I need, can you get this off my plate? Can you take ownership of the proactive maintenance and monitoring of when these licenses are coming due for expiration, handling the actual filing of the renewal of the licenses and giving you visibility to where all that lives within your technology platform? So outsourcing is a very popular business license service, where effectively we take our expertise, bring that to the table, and in an outsourced fashion start handling those filings again proactively to keep your renewals where they should be.

And then also though we recognize that there are some organizations that feel that they have the knowledge to understand what's due where. They have the bandwidth to handle the renewals. But really they're looking for technology to assist them in all of that effort. So we do offer a very powerful and award-winning solution called License Pro.

So I would describe it as a self-service application. So it basically takes license software, and it goes beyond just renewal management. It really transforms all of the work around keeping your business licenses compliant. So it has really configuration and customization abilities around dashboards, custom workflows, and task management to make sure that the right set of team members are involved in all the ins and outs of renewing licenses and managing them. It has document storage capabilities, custom reporting. So it's a very powerful analytical tool for organizations again that aren't looking to outsource. They want to keep this in-house in terms of handling renewals and research, but they really want technology to make their lives easier to handle the actual renewals of their business licenses.

So now that we've talked about business licenses and annual reports, which is a lot to digest, what about international companies? And so many of the organizations that we work with are multinationals that have entities around the globe. And so Andrea is going to talk a little about some of those challenges and some of the solutions that CSC can bring to bear.

Andrea: Now David, I don't mean to keep making this a competition about whose topic is more complicated, but arguably managing an international or a multinational entity portfolio can be as complicated as it gets. I think it's fair to say that all of these business disciplines really come with their own specific challenges and things that can complicate the process, and each are kind of perhaps equally in scale of complication. But when it comes to managing global entities, first requirements can vary so greatly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The requirements could be different based on the entity type that is doing business. So these varying jurisdictional requirements can present a complex regulatory landscape for organizations, and it can really lead to a lack of understanding of local and jurisdictional requirements and just really a lot of pain points around understanding exactly what's necessary to do business in these global markets and to retain that good standing of your entities.

Certainly a lack of understanding those items can have significant consequences. In fact, much more significant than what we see commonly in the United States here. So the fees, the penalties are much higher in these global markets than commonly experienced or assess in the United States. The use of multiple providers can exacerbate compliance risk and budget uncertainty globally. The receipt of multiple invoices and foreign currencies and hourly rates can make it very complicated to calculate your total spend for your global corporate secretarial services. So there are a host of challenges associated with having that fragmented global approach to your corporate secretarial needs.

Other challenges can include cultural and language barriers and time zone differences. Certainly each of these can really cause delays in getting things done and being able to adequately meet the requirements that are set forth by these business registries around the world. So having a trusted partner like CSC can be incredibly beneficial because we can help you to understand exactly what needs to get done, when that needs to get done, and we can proactively take care of those services as kind of an extension of your legal team.

CSC provides a comprehensive solution to tackle all of these global compliance needs, and we do so in over 145 jurisdictions worldwide. I mentioned earlier kind of a good standing audit with our annual report services I think, and we do a very similar audit in the global space.

So part of getting started with your global portfolio is to understand the current status of your entities, including things like the deadlines and requirements that are imposed by the business registries in each jurisdiction as well as any deficiencies that may exist if applicable. Deficiencies in organizations could include things like missed meetings or missed filings, perhaps an incorrect number of directors as required by a jurisdiction, or maybe even by your bylaws for your organization. There could be incorrect addresses on file or other company changes that weren't updated with the business registry.

Our core service is annual compliance support, where after we understand where we're starting from, we really take on the ongoing maintenance of your entities to really centralize and simplify all of the requirements that are due to the business registry on an annual basis. I mentioned that these requirements can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. But these requirements can include things like the maintenance of your minute books and shareholder registers, the preparation of your annual general meeting, the filing of annual accounts, corporate document maintenance both physical books in Country as well as digital minute book maintenance in CSC's award-winning Entity Management platform, the tracking of your compliance deadlines and requirements. Most critically perhaps is the monitoring of regulatory changes, having experts in your corner with an ear to the ground to be able to help you understand what new requirements are coming on board or what regulatory changes are imposed by these various jurisdictions and being able to properly interpret and address those items proactively to ensure again that your good standing never skips a beat. We also can provide company secretary and directorship services. We offer registered office or domiciliation in global jurisdictions.

CSC can also assist clients with other needs that might arise that are separate from these general day-to-day needs, and this can include what we would consider more like transaction-based items, things like officer and director changes, formation and liquidation support, if you need ad hoc resolution drafts, maybe document retrieval, assistance with ultimate beneficial owner or apostille or legalization, maybe license renewals. So there's plenty that we can bring to the table from a global services standpoint.

You may also need some more incredibly specialized services, things like accounting and reporting, maybe tax compliance services or payroll, treasury management, digital brand services, escrow services. These are all areas that CSC is positioned to support and manage for our customers again around the world.

And I mentioned that the data and documents that are related to all of these global services and filings will flow automatically into CSC's Entity Management technology. Our Entity Management platform is also incredibly robust and powerful and has many features that can be leveraged proactively on your own. So David is going to share more about entity management and how CSC can help you there.

David: Absolutely. And so that tees me up very nicely. I appreciate that. So we're going to talk first about what is entity management software. So really what we're talking about is specialized, purpose-built technology that helps organizations manage the compliance of their entities. And so this would include things like tracking entity data, directors and officers, being able to generate structure charts that create visual pictures of your ownership relationships, being able to track compliance events, upload and manage your governance documents, like consents or resolutions, any sort of charter documents, like articles, bylaws, etc. So really again it's purpose-built software that really aids corporate legal departments and law firms managing entities to really give them the tools needed to do the task at hand, which again is keeping entities in compliance and having a solid source of truth for all of this information.

And so what are some of the pitfalls of not having a solution? And we certainly talk with organizations day in day out that are kind of muddling along as best they can without proper technology, and so they're using spreadsheets. For information, they might have shared drives. For documents, they might be using programs like PowerPoint or Visio to manually do org charts. And it's not that it can't be done, but it creates so many challenges. It's incredibly inefficient. It's very hard to actually collaborate with individuals. I spoke with a client just the other day who talked about one of the great benefits of using our Entity Management software was the fact that she has finance people around the world and there's a central source of truth that they can securely collaborate around where if there's a need for informational documents, it's all in one secure, trusted area.

Reporting is another great example of how within our technology you can click a button and easily get lists of directors, officers, ownership records, etc. It's all at your fingertips. Whereas again, without technology, it becomes pretty onerous to try to put together an accurate picture when that time comes.

So let's talk a little bit about CSC Entity Management. So it is a very robust solution. You'll see here on the slide a number of the sort of most notable capabilities — document management, electronic signatures, org charts, minute books, directors and officers, calendaring. We have an integration with the SEC's EDGAR database for publicly-traded companies that need to file Section 16 filings, that's Forms 3, 4, and 5.

So there's a very robust stack of capabilities that is evolving really dramatically every year. So typically on a typical year, every three to four months there are new capabilities that are going live in this solution. We've already had a couple of notable upgrades this year. And so again, it's a platform that we've invested in quite heavily to make sure that it does have all of the so-called bells and whistles or again critical capabilities that organizations rely on to do proper entity management. And I'm excited in the probably the smallest time frame that we'll have for the demo at the end to kind of give a little bit of a sneak peek of some of those capabilities.

But before we do that, we want to talk about kind of the last major service area that complements registered agent, which is service of process and enterprise legal management. So Andrea, can you explain what the heck are we talking about here?

Andrea: Yeah, absolutely. Service of process is notice to a party of the commencement of legal action. SOP really is a document, quite frankly, that relates to litigation. These documents can include things like lawsuits, wage garnishments, subpoenas, foreclosures, bankruptcy notices, other documents that are issued by courts and administrative bodies.

There are many challenges that are associated with the tracking and the handling of SOP documents. First, SOP can often be handled by a multitude of teams and departments or even outside partners, maybe outside counsel or payroll companies involved in garnishments for example. Properly receiving and routing SOP to those parties can be incredibly tedious. It can be manual. It can be difficult to understand kind of the status or where a particular document or case is sitting at this time. And of course it can open organizations up to data security and privacy concerns throughout that process as well.

The right technology platform can make staying on top of your SOP much easier. It can provide you with better collaboration, better reportability, better visibility. So having that type of technology platform is crucial.

The improper handling of SOP can result in loss of good standing. You can incur default judgments, other fines and penalties. And having a partner like CSC to take care of that process for you and to ease your mind there, we really can free you from the risks of that improper handling and service of process and allow you to stay focused on more important things, like growing your core business.

So some of the technology platforms that we have available for you, there's actually a wide variety in the SOP and ELM space based on what it is our customer specifically needs.

So on the basic end of the technology continuum is what's called CSC SOP Manager, and this is CSC's core technology that's included with our registered agent services. CSC, we receive, scan, and upload SOP documents within 24 hours. Optical character recognition or OCR is applied to each of your documents, and then those documents are furnished to you within the SOP Manager technology so that you can respond to them, you can triage them as necessary, and have perpetual access. That's a critical distinguisher. CSC always perpetually retains your documents in our SOP platform for review and action. We will never purge or delete documents at any point in time.

CSC's SOP Pro includes all of the benefits of the SOP Manager technology, but also provides more robust functionality for customers that need more features or a more collaborative environment or more capability to customize or personalize or configure the database. So a complex rules engine can help to automate the distribution and routing of service of process based on each organization's unique requirements. Collaboration tools are available within SOP Pro, including acknowledgment workflows, task management, the support of custom data fields, document maintenance, and in-depth reporting. The SOP Pro platform can also be integrated with other third-party systems and ELM platforms.

Our most comprehensive solution is Enterprise Legal Management, which combines CSC's Matter Management and legal spend management solutions together. So this includes all features of SOP Pro. It also provides for the maintenance of many other types of matters beyond service of process or litigation. This could include things like contracts, real estate, intellectual property, maintenance, claims, deals. So many things could be a matter. Each matter category can have its own customized matter templates and specific file folders and data fields with strong search capabilities across the entire platform.

And the legal spend management solution allows for automatic validation of legal invoices to ensure compliance with your department's billing guidelines. Approval workflows can be established, allowing for the easy routing and collaboration or review on invoices by the appropriate reviewers. API integrations with your accounts payable system can automate the flow of approved invoices to your AP team for payment, and conversely paid data can flow back into the CSC's Matter and Spend Management Systems. So again, you can have really in-depth reporting by matter, by vendor, and so much more visibility.

So we have just a little bit of time left together, and I would really love to get into the technology demonstration. So in just a second we're going to be launching the screen share to get into the technology demos. Our goal is to provide you with a very high-level overview of the various technology platforms that we can provide for you. All of these solutions are incredibly powerful, and they're centrally accessed within what's called our CSCNavigator platform. Here you can see it's kind of the centralized hub for each of these technologies and service areas.

You'll only ever have one user account for accessing CSCNavigator. But we at CSC have many demonstration accounts to show our different technologies and role-based permissions. So throughout our demonstration, David and I are going to be trading off on this presentation so that we can show you as much as possible. But what this really means for our customers is that the CSCNavigator platform can provide you and your stakeholders with the right level of role-based access to each and any one of these technologies solutions and the automated flow of the results of our services flowing into those platforms centrally inside of this CSCNavigator solution.