Compliance Demo Series: CSC Entity Management’s Next-Level Org Charts

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, "Compliance Demo Series: CSC Entity Management's Next-Level Org Charts." 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 Governance 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 of 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: Hey, everyone, good morning or good afternoon wherever you're joining us from. Thanks for joining us and we're so happy that you're here.

David: Absolutely. We're really thrilled with the number of folks that registered for today's session, and we know there's a great level of interest in this content. So really we're excited to share what we have to offer around entity management and org charts.

But before I get ahead of myself, which I'm almost doing that, let's first talk about the agenda for today's webinar. So we do recognize that there are a number of folks in our audience today that are not currently working with CSC in any capacity, so we want to spend a moment to talk a little bit about CSC as an organization. We'll talk a bit about entity management software, what is it, why do organizations implement this type of technology, and then talk about why organizations are generating org charts and some of the challenges that come along with that. And then really we'll then pivot into a little bit of an overview of our Entity Management technology, but again with a main focus in terms of the org charting capabilities within the solution.

Really the highlight, for me, is a technology demonstration. So this is where you might want to kind of get your popcorn ready because I think we've got some great things to show you. And then certainly we'll look to address questions via the Q&A widget as they come and then try to save some time at the tail end to get those questions as well.

So without further ado, I have the pleasure of talking a little bit about CSC as an organization. Really this slide talks about some of the markets that we serve, and there's some statistics here. But to give you a little bit more of a sense of our company, I've got some kind of quick hitting stats about CSC.

There are currently over 3,000 employees with CSC across 14 countries in 46 different locations. Our global headquarters is in Wilmington, Delaware. We're a privately held organization, and our roots go all the way back to 1899. We're very proud to say that we're the largest U.S.-owned registered agent. We're also the largest registered agent by market share. That's really kind of our calling card and our bread and butter, a service that we've been known for, for many, many decades. But then also you'll see that 90% of the Fortune 500 utilize CSC for at least one of our services.

As it specifically relates to the Entity Management software that we'll get into later on in the webinar, we're again very happy to say that over 20% of the Fortune 500 are utilizing CSC Entity Management. And really the part of CSC that Andrea and I are a part of, we call Corporate Legal Solutions, our mission really is to deliver really and become an indispensable partner to our customers by having solutions that integrate with world-class service, compelling technology, and provide actionable data. And hopefully, we'll start to see that kind of come into focus as we get into the technology demonstration itself.

So with that, we want to make sure that we're all on the same page in terms of our terminology because entity management can mean different things to different people. So, Andrea, if you'll be so kind, can you kind of take us through a little bit about what we're referring to in terms of entity management software?

Andrea: Absolutely, David. So with that said, the entity management software, sometimes we have different definitions for what that software can do for us, as David said. Generally speaking, entity management software is going to be specialized software that helps to make the components of your entity management processes more streamlined and centralized. So that technology will serve or can serve as your main source of truth for managing your entity data, tracking your ownership records, and generating graphic or text-based org charts, tracking officer and director information. And we use this classification a bit loosely as you might be tracking other critical appointments outside of officers or directors, such as your members, managers, partners, powers of attorney. So that transcends even beyond just traditional officer or director roles.

Entity management software can be used for managing electronic minute books and documents. You can receive and schedule alerts and reminders for your events and deadlines. And you're also able to, of course, generate very robust reports. So the technology will really help you with managing really all aspects of your corporate compliance and the complete processes for any of your entities all around the world.

It probably goes without saying why anybody might implement an entity management software, but this software is so important now more than ever because there is such a changing landscape for corporate compliance, legislative rules, requirements for maintaining your good status or standing in jurisdictions all around the world. Regulatory complexity continues to grow, and it can be very tough to keep up with these different changes. Entity management software can help to avoid the pitfalls and unnecessary risks as your organization navigates through various different international, state, county, local filing requirements by these various jurisdictions.

Entity management software can provide you with a centralization and collaborative space and offers you efficient access to entity documents and records. You always know that you're working with up-to-date, accurate data and documents and information, and it can provide a complete transparency across your portfolio.

Advanced entity management solutions can provide much more than just a repository or a holding tank for data and documents. The best entity management solutions will be highly configurable, based on the needs of your individual organization, to provide you with tracking and reporting that are very specific to your portfolio needs. Those technologies can provide workflow automation, streamlining your processes for filings, managing entity life cycle events, and enabling transparency all throughout these processes, even connecting teams all around the world regardless of which jurisdiction or country you might be participating in corporate governance or managing your portfolio.

Robust reporting and analytics can provide your organization with detailed point-in-time analyses and help give you critical insights for making business decisions. Many software solutions also can provide integrations with other solutions, third-party solutions so that you can seamlessly connect your two systems for maximum efficiency.

David: So let's talk a bit about org charts, right. That's really the focus of our webinar today. So before we get into the CSC solution, which we're obviously excited to share, let's talk about fundamentally why are organizations creating org charts in the first place. And so there's that old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think that certainly applies here, where it's really a need to create visualization around your ownership structures.

And so M&A activity is once again kind of on fire after a little bit of a slowdown, perhaps related to the pandemic, and so whether you are acquiring or maybe potentially being acquired, I think being able to kind of generate clear visualization around your structures is important. Also, entity rationalization and simplification efforts. So often, again if you've gone through a lot of mergers, you might have taken on a bunch of entities, and there's the question of, "Okay, well, why do we have all these companies? And I'm sure they had a purpose when they were formed, but let's sort of evaluate where we are." There's certainly a cost to maintaining entities, and so there's often a desire to kind of make sure that there's rationalization around the portfolio of entities that you have, and being able to create structure charts to visualize that really helps with that effort.

Also there's often a need to disclose ownership information, whether that's for due diligence purposes, like Know Your Client (KYC), which is again very critical when you have international companies certainly. And then also, if you're in a regulated industry, like insurance, as an example, there might be filings that are specific to your vertical that necessitate having your finger on the pulse of your ownership data and being able to generate charts.

And then, classically, as we talk with organizations, it's most often the corporate legal department that is responsible for being able to generate the charts, but it's also quite common that it's a shared responsibility, where there are folks in the tax side of the organization that either are responsible or also have needs to be able to have access to these visual charts.

So what are some of the challenges when folks are generating structure charts. And so, again, the bulk of the audience here is saying that they're kind of doing things in a bit of a manual process, and at the end of the day that's time consuming sitting there and kind of playing around so to speak with Visio and PowerPoint and moving things around and manipulating.

And, of course, entity management is an exercise in change management, right? Things are often fluid where we're forming, we're dissolving, acquiring, and so there's often a need to change the charts. And again, if it's manual, that's time consuming.

There's often a need to be able to do that point-in-time analysis, where it's helpful to understand what did the structure look like a year ago or a month ago. And again, if you're using kind of a manual process, when is the last time I saved the chart, and it might be very challenging to have an understanding of what the structure looked like at a particular point in the past.

In terms of generating charts, it might not always be a situation where you want the entire chart. Maybe you're looking for a piece of the chart that you're looking to share with an internal or external stakeholder, and so that can become a little bit challenging with the manual process.

Large charts are probably the biggest pain point that we hear. When organizations have let's say more than 50 or so entities, the laws of physics start to work against you if you're looking to print that on a single piece of legal size paper. And so it can be really daunting to try to share charts that are digestible if you're a larger organization with a fair volume of entities in your structure.

And then just maybe one other one, I'll touch on the last one here. For those that are using technology systems that help with the generation of the chart, some cases you love the fact that it's way more efficient. You press a button and the visualization is there. But then sometimes you're sort of stuck with what the system has created, and you don't have a mechanism to kind of tweak things and get things precisely the way you want to see them. And so sometimes it's almost like a trade-off, where you're not quite sure if it's worth giving up some of that control that you have when you're doing things manually. So certainly the best solutions are going to give you the best of both worlds.

So we definitely hear these as challenges and we'll start to kind of show in the demo how we feel that our technology is able to kind of address these one by one.

So with that, Andrea, I think you're going to talk a little bit about our entity platform before we get into that demo. I'm so excited I keep talking about the demo. But let's talk a little bit at a high level first about the Entity Management software.

Andrea: Absolutely. Absolutely. So CSC's Entity Management software, without belaboring it too much, it can do a lot of things. It is a robust platform that provides users with powerful yet user-friendly ways to store, organize, and monitor the status of your entities around the world.

In fact, I saw some questions. I've been communicating with some of you in the Q&A widget, and we're so grateful for your participation. Please keep those questions coming. We love answering those questions and want to take them even on our live demo if we can. So keep using that Q&A widget.

I've answered a couple questions about your ability to manage documents and files inside of the Entity Management system in an unlimited fashion. You can manage your corporate data and information, including an unlimited number of custom data fields. There's a lot of ways that you can highly customize and configure the Entity Management technology so that you can capture custom entity vitals or custom officer or director appointment level custom fields, capital and ownership custom fields. So lots of flexibility there.

We talked about the management of director and officer information, again transcending beyond just officers or directors, but any other role or capacity that's important to you.

We also include a Section 16 filing tool. So you have the ability to submit those forms so that you can take care of those obligations.

CSC's Entity Management provides you with a central repository for managing your minute books and other documents. And we most recently integrated with DocuSign, so we provide an electronic signature workflow to all of our customers.

You'll have a tool for generating and visualizing org charts, which we keep teasing here, and we're going to get into the demo in just a minute. We'll dive into that live demo.

You also can do things like track your DBAs, stock and ownership management. Critically, it's going to provide you with deadline management and compliance calendar alerts and reminders. There's robust and flexible reporting mechanisms, and so much more.

We would really love to share with you a deep dive of the actual Entity Management solution in full so that we can talk about your needs and talk about how our technology can help you. But again, we're just going to focus critically on the org charts when we jump into the live demo in just a second.

What makes CSC Entity Management different? We have a complete integration with CSC's compliance and filing services. Anytime CSC provides any type of service for your group anywhere around the world, domestically in the U.S., globally with entities domestic elsewhere and in various other jurisdictions outside of the U.S., the data and the documents and information that we manage and maintain as your corporate secretarial partner is going to flow automatically into CSC Entity Management. So annual reports, if we file them, any filings that we apply or create and submit to the business registries in jurisdictions around the world, you're going to see all of that flowing in real time into our technology.

It's incredibly intuitive. We offer a high degree of configurability as I noted in our last slide there. We also maintain the highest levels of security and availability. All of our systems, CSC is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant. We also maintain all of our data and documents and information on dedicated CSC servers in a U.S.-based ISO 27001 certified environment. We never outsource the management or the security to third parties. So we maintain again those highest levels of security and availability.

We also have a very transparent and kind of different pricing structure than other providers in this space. So unlike other providers, CSC provides a complete flat rate pricing model, and the pricing for Entity Management is inclusive of unlimited users. All of the system features of Entity Management, all enhancements perpetually, every time we release new enhancements, those will just flow automatically. You don't pay money. You don't install anything. Unlimited free training and support.

And we kind of have a multi-year, a five-year vision if you will as to where our road map and our advancement of our technology is going. We are incredibly dedicated to the technology and constantly refreshing it and providing your group with a changing and better and newer features so that we can grow our technology with your changing and evolving needs over time.

So we're going to jump in here now to talk about some of those enhancements just briefly so that we can share with you what we've done recently and kind of where we're going. And then we will jump into our demo.

David: Yeah, wonderful. And so, Andrea, you mentioned the regular enhancements, and this slide really is meant to sort of prove that out, right? It's not just we're saying that, oh, every three to four months on average we're rolling out new capabilities. This is kind of a running timeline of the last five years or so of major enhancements that we've made in the solution. And we won't belabor all of these, but it's a nice kind of takeaway.

You'll see at the kind of the beginning of this journey, going back to 2018, we made a number of improvements to our text-based or what we often call linear org charts, which we'll provide some examples of in a little bit. And then more towards modern times, this was about a year ago, in July of last year, it's referenced as number 13 of the timeline, we made a significant series of enhancements to our graphical org charting capabilities by introducing a suite of services that we call Chartfolio, which we'll absolutely look to demonstrate today.

But certainly there's a number of things in between there as well in terms of folder level security, which is a very advanced level of being able to lock down documents from users. Lots of examples of different customization capabilities in the platform. I think we've talked a little bit about our recent integration and partnership with DocuSign for e-signatures. And there's so much more that's kind of inflate as we speak in terms of new capabilities that our team is actively working on that we'll see later on this year and in years to come in the platform.

So the story here really is that CSC is incredibly committed to this solution. It's critical for our clients, and so we are investing, again, year after year in new capabilities to ensure that we have a competitive and compelling software solution in the entity management space.

This slide, I feel a little funny sometimes sharing this slide because it's a little bit of bragging, but this is some really nice third-party validation that we have of what is an award-winning technology. And so for 11 straight years, there's a reader survey from the "New York Law Journal," and CSC Entity Management has finished as a top three aka best solution in the market. More recently, the CLOC organization partnered with the ACC and did a state of the union survey around a range of questions, and CSC Entity Management was the most cited solution used by the individuals that were part of that particular survey.

And then, even more recently, the "National Law Journal" created a Trailblazer award for the first time. It was something that would not just go to individuals, but it could go to technology. And CSC Entity Management was awarded as a trailblazing technology in large part due to our ability to integrate our services and our technology together.

So let's now segue into some specifics about CSC org chart capabilities. And so you'll see this in real time momentarily, but we have an opportunity through our technology, for clients that subscribe to Entity Management, to automate the generation of both graphic and text-based charts. So it's really a matter of tracking your ownership data, and the system really does the rest of the work in terms of visualizing those structures.

We do support both current as well as historical org charts. I think there was a question that came through the Q&A about that. So absolutely we've got that point-in-time capability.

We also can support ownership structures based on different classes or types of ownership. So we'll perhaps get into that concept a little bit.

We are able to render charts in real time as you're going through the process of creating charts. And then Chartfolio, which we alluded to before, introduces a range of really advanced customization capabilities, where especially for folks with larger org charts, instead of having that one massive chart that's really challenging to make sense of, you can purposely break charts into multiple pages. You can add legends so that people understand why you have different shapes and colors. So there's some really nice configurability features within what we call Chartfolio.

We have the ability to download charts into various formats, including PDF, directly into Visio, Word, and Excel. And there's a lot of thought that has gone into your ability to intelligently share or not share charts within and outside of the system. So you have a great degree of control over which of your users would have access to running charts or having access to save charts within the technology itself.