CSC Entity Management Compliance Demo—Including New Features

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, "CSC Entity Management Compliance Demo." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today is David Jefferis. David is the 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 consolidated services to clients of CSC Entity Management.

And with that, let's welcome David.

David: Thank you, Caitlin, and I wanted to say thank you to our audience for joining us today. We're really excited for today's webinar. There are so many features that I'm excited to show with in our Entity platform, and so without further ado, let's jump right in.

And so let's take a look at today's agenda. I did take a peek at our list of registrants, and I see a lot of names of individuals and companies that I recognize, and so we certainly appreciate your business. But certainly I saw some names of companies that are new to me, and so we do want to take a moment to talk a little bit about CSC as an organization for those that might not be familiar. We want to talk about entity management, what is it. It's somewhat of a broad term, so we want to again level set and really define what we're meaning when we talk about entity management as a practice and as an application.

And then really the focal point today is going to be to take an in-depth look at the award-winning CSC Entity Management solution, with a specific focus on recent enhancements. So we're really going to focus on new capabilities that we've launched in the platform in about the last 12 to 13 months. But we're always hard at work, we're in the laboratory, so to speak, always working on new capabilities, and so we are going to spend a little bit of time also talking about some of the I call the in-flight development, some of the things that we're actively working on that will be the next round of enhancements that will go live in the platform later this year and in the following year. And then, again, we're going to do a live demo so that we can see all of these great new capabilities.

We'll look to save some time at the end for Q&A, but there is, as was mentioned a moment ago, a Q&A widget. So really at any moment please fire away with your questions. I'm a little bit of a one-man band today as a presenter, so it may be a little bit challenging for me to present and answer Q&A live, but certainly that's why we'll save time at the end to make sure that we can try to get to all the questions that might come through during today's presentation.

So let's take a moment to talk about CSC. I'll give folks a moment to kind of digest and orient their eyes to the slide that you're seeing here. And really we're a company that's been around for over 120 years, but in some ways we feel like a new company because we went through a major acquisition in November of last year of the Intertrust Group, which has dramatically expanded the scope of our organization in terms of our employee count, the number of countries where we have a physical location, and also the breadth of global services that we're able to bring to the market as an organization. But again, we're still that company that you've known for many years, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware.

We are privately held. The roots of our company go back all the way to 1899. We're very proud of the heritage that we have as an organization. We are the largest U.S.-owned registered agent, which is perhaps the service that we're best known for. Also if you look at Delaware market share for registered agent, which is really kind of a barometer of overall market share, we are also number one in that category as well. Over 90% of the Fortune 500 utilize CSC for at least one of our services. As it specifically relates to the Entity Management platform that we'll explore in detail today, we're very proud to say that over 20% of the Fortune 500 utilize CSC Entity Management. And so again, a company that's been around for 120 years, but really still growing and thriving and evolving, especially with the acquisition of the Intertrust Group, really becoming a premier provider of administration and compliance services around the globe.

So let's talk about entity management. I mentioned a moment ago that it can be somewhat of a broad term. When someone says we're interested in entity management services, for some folks that could mean software. For other folks that could mean things like registered agent and global cosec services. So again, to kind of align ourselves in today's webinar, what do we mean when we talk about entity management?

So first and foremost, entity management I really think of it as a discipline, where it's a practice of keeping entities in compliance and being able to produce information about companies when needed, whether that's data about your companies, supporting governance documents, the ability to maybe generate structure charts to create a visual depiction of your entities from a from a legal ownership standpoint. And we use that term "multi-department discipline." We understand that it is, much more often than not, the corporate legal department that bears the heavy lifting in terms of managing the compliance of the entities, but they're also working in conjunction with departments like tax and finance and Treasury. And then I've heard it said that entity management is a team sport, which is maybe another kind of colloquial way to describe the fact that it's not just one group within an organization, but again it's a multi-department endeavor to really keep companies in compliance.

And so in order to perform this discipline and do the work of keeping companies in compliance and having access to this critical information at your fingertips, it's really why entity management software was created in the first place. And really now for decades this has been a niche software space, where providers offer technology that is purpose-built to help organizations, law firms, and corporate legal departments to kind of manage the day-to-day information, compliance events, etc. related to their entities.

And so really that is going to be the focal point today, talking about software that allows you to manage information about your companies beyond just the names of the companies and where they're registered, but getting into, again, ownership records, directors-officers, other key vitals of information for your organization, being able to create those structure charts to create visual depictions of your ownership relationships, whether that's for internal or maybe external stakeholders, being able to manage all of what I'll call the governance documents for a subsidiary, not just charter documents, like formation documents, articles, bylaws, etc., but also minutes, consents, and resolutions, the ability to click a button and generate reports, whether that's getting a list of all your active subsidiaries and where they're doing business or breakdowns of boards of directors, etc., but having again a very simple mechanism to generate information based on your entity information from these types of software platforms. And then also critical is transparency around compliance events.

Again, entity management can be considered a lot of things, but I think at its core, at its most sort of critical point, it's the ability to maintain that good standing compliance for entities around the world. And so again, proper entity management software will lend visibility and even automation, which we'll talk more about in a moment, around when are events coming due that ultimately have an impact to the good standing status of the companies that we're managing. So that's a bit about what entity management software is, sort of at a macro level.

Now we have a poll question coming up in a little bit, where we'll look to kind of assess our audience in terms of are you using entity management software, are you not currently using an off-the-shelf, purpose-built entity management solution. So we'll look to understand that in a bit more detail.

But the slide that we're looking at together now talks about the reasons why people implement entity management software. And fundamentally, there are so many pitfalls for organizations that don't have proper technology. And so we do work with organizations day in, day out, we have conversations where folks are saying, "Well, I've got spreadsheets for my entity data. I've got shared drives where various governance documents from entities reside. I am manually creating org charts in programs like PowerPoint or Visio." And it's really a fractured approach that is very labor intensive. It also is very difficult to foster a collaboration when you have information that's fractured, and it's very difficult to create a culture of self-service, where stakeholders within your organization can have easy access to information.

And so proper entity management software really provides a central source of truth where not just the corporate legal department, but internal and external stakeholders can again securely collaborate and access information. Entity management software can introduce automation, so the automatic generation of reports and org charts and the ability to get documents signed electronically, which we'll explore today. Again reporting will be available at your fingertips as opposed to having to manually cobble together information. Again proper entity management software can add incredible efficiencies when it comes to reporting against entity data.

And then also, it's the last bullet point, but it's really important, and that's that while entity management systems are critical and they become again a source of truth for legal entity data, within your enterprise there are likely other sources of truth for things like employee records in the case of HR or maybe there's a document management system, for example, that is the catch-all platform for all of your documents across your enterprise. And so leading entity management platforms, modern entity management platforms are going to really offer the ability to connect your entity management software to other systems so that there is an ongoing, secure collaboration and integration between your entity management software and other third-party applications that you're leveraging or internal, homegrown applications as well.

So this is where we're really going to go right into the meat of our presentation, which is talking in depth about CSC Entity Management, the technology platform that CSC brings to the market. And so if you think back just a few slides about what are some of the capabilities that an entity management system allows you to do, we feel that we've got all the bases covered and more.

And so within our platform, our clients are able to track entity vitals, director and officer data, create online minute books and store and manage documents. We have an integration with DocuSign, which we'll look at in the demo, where clients can route documents for signature electronically. Our clients can track ownership records, from that generate graphical org charts. They can track DBAs. For publicly-traded companies, we also have an integrated Section 16 filer. So if you are obligated via Sarbanes-Oxley to file Forms 3, 4, and 5 with the SEC, we also have an integrated capability on that front.

We have a very robust compliance calendar that lends automated visibility and transparency to when there are compliance events, both here in the States as well as globally, that would impact the good standing status of your company. So not a situation where you've got to manually build those events. The system has the intelligence to create those events for you, which we'll explore. And then absolutely a very robust suite of reporting options so that the information that you're tracking in the system isn't fundamentally trapped in the system, but it's very easy, with a click of a button, to extract information via reports.

And then not noted here, and shame on me, I'll have to update this slide, but we also have an entity API so that we have a framework for again being able to take information that you're managing in the platform and effectively integrating it with various applications within your enterprise. So again, that's another option that we bring to the table with CSC Entity Management.

Now the first sentence there, which I glossed over, I should come back to it, is really, really important, and it's the fact that CSC Entity Management is not a standalone piece of technology. Rather it is completely integrated with the services that we offer through acting as a registered agent here in the U.S. or acting as a corporate secretarial partner globally through a suite of services that we call Global Subsidiary Management. And so the short story, I'll try to keep it a short story, when you're engaging CSC, either for our registered agent compliance service and/or our Global Subsidiary Management compliance service for non-U.S. companies, the data and documents that we're managing in those capacities flow automatically into the system. And so we'll sort of hone in on that in the demo so that you can kind of see it in practical terms. But it is a critical distinction where our clients do not have to manually upload every single piece of information or manually upload every single piece of document. Instead there's this ongoing flow of vetted information, both data and documents and compliance events into the technology that you can leverage and build on top of as this really incredible foundation of information. So I do want to hit that point because it's been sort of just the most critical element of the success that we've had with this Entity Management solution.

So what does make CSC Entity Management different? Perhaps I was foreshadowing the next slide a little bit with some of those comments there. And again, it is that complete integration of the data and documents through our compliance services.

So just to give sort of a simple, sort of hypothetical example, if you were to engage CSC to form an entity on your behalf, whether that's a U.S. company or a global entity, that entity actually would appear automatically in your CSC Entity Management portfolio, the name of the company, where it's formed, the formation date, the entity type, and then the actual formation document would then automatically be linked to the company as well. And if that's not enough, the compliance calendar would then automatically let you know when the next set of annual filings are coming due that impact the good standing status of that company. So again, tremendous integration with our services, tremendous automation in terms of how that gets represented in the technology itself.

I think the second bullet point is really important as well, which is that the platform, and we hear this quite a bit and it's always sort of music to my ears, that it's a very easy to use and intuitive solution. And so, I mean fundamentally, I think there's a Steve Jobs quote on this somewhere, but it's kind of easy to build something that's difficult to use. It's actually much more challenging to build a platform that has a lot of capabilities that's effectively simple, not just for power users that are in there every day using it, but also for users that are a little bit more casual, that maybe log in a little more intermittently or every so often to locate a document or run an org chart or run a report. And so we want to make sure that the platform is feature rich, because again we understand there are a lot of tasks that our users have to perform, but still fundamentally intuitive in terms of it being really easy to use the capabilities in the platform. So that's really kind of a bit of a North Star that we have from a development and design standpoint.

I talked a little bit about the third bullet before, but I do want to come back to it and that's the automated creation of compliance events. Again there's no need to be somehow aware, clairvoyant in terms of when are all my global filings coming due for my entities. There's knowledge and rules in the system, which we'll touch on in the demo, that actually automate the creation of those events, that you can see at any time in the technology, and then our users can also receive proactive notifications via email. So whether it's a month, two or three months in advance, you can have friendly reminders coming to your inbox to keep you apprised of these upcoming, good standing related annual compliance events for both U.S. and non-U.S. companies.

The platform is incredibly secure and available. So we go through great lengths to protect the information. We understand the critical sensitivity of the information that our clients are tracking in the platform. So there's various third-party audits that we go through on an annual basis and risk assessments that we perform. And certainly for those that are interested, there's a lot of documentation that we can provide around the sort of what we'll call our security posture, which is incredibly strong around the platform itself.

Another thing that makes CSC unique from some of our competitors is the inclusive nature of our annual subscription fee. And so when you're paying for CSC Entity Management, which again is on an annual subscription basis, it does include unlimited users. So we're not charging for what some providers call seat licenses, where effectively you start to get penalized if you're looking to scale the platform out to a broader audience. Also our platform automatically includes all the features and all of the enhancements, which is going to be the focal point today of our conversation. And so there are competitors that will restrict the features that you have access to, maybe depending on what version of their system you purchase. And then again, depending on what version of their system you purchase, you may or may not get some of the new capabilities. We take all of that guessing game out of the equation and you know that you're getting all the capabilities and all the upgrades as a part of your ongoing subscription.

And then also training is free and unlimited as well. And so there are some competitors that will perhaps give some basic level of training, but then again looking to perhaps kind of nickel-and-dime you down the line as you need more training. And inevitably, if you're using a software platform for a number of years, there are going to be more folks that need training, right? There's people that leave the organization, people that come in, new stakeholders that want to get engaged with the platform. And so the life cycle of the relationship is such that with CSC, again we're not putting limitations on the amount of training that you can receive, and that's all a part of that annual subscription fee.

And then also last, but not least, this is really kind of what I focus on here at CSC, which is what we'll call the roadmap. And so there has been sustained investment from our senior leadership team in terms of committing to developing new capabilities in the platform. And so we'll see in slides and then we'll even see in real time in the demo the fact that again there's just new feature after new feature improving. And really where we get the ideas from are from our customers, and so we're having conversations day in, day out with prospects that are evaluating the technology, where we're documenting the features that they're looking for. We're having conversations every day with existing customers, where again that's being documented as well. And so we're taking note of all of that and then synthesizing it into what are the most critical capabilities that will have sort of the biggest bang for the buck in terms of adding the most value to our customers and candidly attract more customers to the solution.

So with that, let's talk a little bit about our awards. And it's again not where we want to kind of brag, but we want to say don't take our word for it. It's not just us saying that our system is top-notch and really a leading platform in the industry. But really here's some validation from third-party organizations that are attesting to and recognizing the leading position that CSC Entity Management really has in the market.

The one I'll actually hone in on is the middle one. And so in 2021, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, known as CLOC, partnered with the Association of Corporate of Counsel, known as ACC, and they did a really exhaustive study, they called it their State of the Industry Report, where they surveyed over 200 organizations across 22 industries and across 21 countries. So this was a very broad-reaching survey. And they asked really simple questions. Are you using any signature tool, and if so, which one are you using? Are you using an enterprise legal management system, and if so, what are you using? And so for the category of Corporate Governance and Entity Management, CSC Entity Management was the most cited technology used by again that broad list of organizations that were surveyed by CLOC and the ACC. So very proud of the recognition that we've received for the platform itself.

Now I talked about, on an earlier slide, the fact that there has been a sustained investment in the platform. And this slide is meant to sort of tell that story in detail in terms of the some enhancements that we've developed in the platform over the last five or six years. And so this slide used to be a linear view of the enhancements, but because we've been rolling out so many capabilities, we've now had to adapt this into a bit of a serpentine. So you kind of have to follow it a little bit, but it's a chronological view of what we've been up to in the platform.

And so there are some big capabilities that we've launched in the last say five or six years, from folder level security, we're now down to the folder level. Our clients can dictate which documents a user could or couldn't see within the solution. Making it easier via drag and drop to upload documents into the platform.

Let's see. We have made some major enhancements to the org charting capabilities, so the ability to manipulate charts on-screen. We have a really powerful feature through a tool we call Chartfolio, where our clients can create subcharts. So if you have a really large org chart that is a bit unwieldy just given the volume of entities that it contains, you can purposely break it out into multiple breakout pages, which we call subcharts, which has been a really powerful and popular feature.

The DocuSign integration went live just over a year ago. We're going to focus on really everything from 15 moving forward. So we're going to talk about DocuSign, some of the automated compliance events. We updated the user interface to make it more modern, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. We've got support for international date format.

And then there is a . . . it's our latest enhancement for the movement, because we have a couple things ready to go live in about a month from now, but the latest feature of the moment is a tool that I want to demonstrate, called our Merger History Workflow, which is really I think powerful in terms of the way that we can track and clean up things when there are mergers of entities within the technology.

And so let's go forward one more slide, and this is where we're going to talk in detail about some of these new enhancements. So electronic signature workflow, again this was February of last year, so just over a year ago we created and developed what I would describe as a pre-built turnkey integration with DocuSign. We did a lot of research with our customers and just sort of understanding that while there are certainly multiple signing software programs on the market, DocuSign really does have that industry-leading status. And so for organizations that are currently using DocuSign, you're able to unlock the DocuSign features within CSC Entity Management. So while you're working in our platform, you can take a document that is ready for signature, define who your signers are, push it out for signature, and then the system gives you transparency to when those documents are fully executed. And then you can actually route the fully signed document to one of your minute book folders for sort of permanent storage within the technology.

The next upgrade, this was August of last year, was a really important sort of move into the future. I mentioned we did this acquisition. CSC performed an acquisition of the Intertrust Group back in November. And this was sort of in anticipation of a sort of hyper focus, if you will, a newfound focus on global capabilities, and that's the automation of global compliance events. Prior to this upgrade, the Good Standing Calendar in CSC Entity Management really only automated events for U.S. subsidiaries, where it would tell you when the annual reports and equivalent filings were coming due.

But now, for organizations that use our GSM service, which again is Global Subsidiary Management, that's the global cosec service, that is where the calendar will now automatically tell you when there are annual filings due for non-U.S. companies as well. And so that's things like annual general meetings, the equivalent of annual reports, the filing of financial statements. And so all of that is built now into the technology. So it's incredibly powerful.

And then also the event status flowing into the calendar. So if you or perhaps outsourcing the preparation of your annual reports domestically here in the States to CSC, you might already be familiar with the fact that the calendar not only tells you what's coming to you via your annual reports, but also you can see where our team is in the process of completing the annual report. But then also if you're using our Global GSM service, we have that same level of transparency when CSC's Global team is completing those annual events for you, you can see in real time the status of those events in the calendar. So that's a little bit about the automation of the global compliance events.

User interface modernization. So I would say that our sort of, I keep coming back to the word "focus," but the focus really around the roadmap is really new features, new capabilities. Having said that, we do recognize that the look and feel of the application is a part of the overall experience. And candidly, the user interface, the screens if you will in the system, it was getting to be a little bit dated, and so we have a dedicated team within the organization that works on user interface and user experience. And we have a modern style guide that we've applied to CSC Entity Management. So this upgrade didn't fundamentally change any features so to speak, as much as it created a much more sleek and modern feel to the application in terms of its user interface, which we feel is certainly important as well.

So let's go to the next slide. This was an upgrade that occurred earlier this year, which is international date format. And so I mentioned there's this desire to become more and more international. In fact, we've done that, and certainly we're going to make sure that the CSC Entity Management application is also fully functional and feeling from an international standpoint.

And so prior to this upgrade, the only date format that the platform supported was the U.S. format of month, day, year. But we certainly recognize that we have a large swath of clients, that utilize our application, that are U.S.-based multinationals, where not only do they have companies that are located around the world, but they have users of the software that are located around the world as well. And of course, in the States, sometimes we do things differently than the rest of the world, and this is a classic example.

And so now with this upgrade, individual users have the ability to define what is my preferred way of looking at dates. Is it month, day, year? Day, month, year? Year, month, day? And then there's also different delimiter options, where it could be slashes, dashes, dots, spaces in terms of how do you sort of tie those numbers together in terms of the date itself. And so that's an upgrade that is live, and individual users can determine for themselves what makes the most sense.

And that's also another sort of hallmark of the application. We talked about it's intuitive, but it's also highly configurable, where clients can create fields and screens. And there's also what I like to call personalization, where different users, even though they're working in the same account with the same set of information, can have different preferences for things they want to see. And this is a classic example of that, where again a person in the States could say, "Well, month, day, year is how I think of things," and then their colleague maybe in another part of the world might say, "Oh, well, for me it's year, month, day." And again, they're not competing or conflicting with one another. Each user can determine the most natural way to look at dates and capture dates within the technology itself.

So the latest enhancement I mentioned for the moment, because we've got some more things lined up, would be Merger History Workflow. And so CSC handles merger filings for our clients day in, day out, where maybe using a simple example a client would say Entity B is going to merge into Entity A, and A will be the survivor and B will be the non-survivor. And when we perform those filings for our clients, we certainly mark the status of Company B as inactive, merged out. And then we would take what we call the filing evidence, the merger document that gets created and returned from what would likely be a secretary of state, and then we tie that merger evidence document to the survivor. And that's again a part of the automation between and the integration from the services and the technology.

But our Entity Management clients were clear that they wanted to go beyond that. They wanted to create a very visible record that I could see that on this day B merged into A. Here's the survivor. Here's the non-survivor. I can capture those. And then there's often, for lack of a better term, cleanup that has to occur after the merger occurs on the non-survivor. So maybe the non-survivor had active directors and officers that we need to expire. Maybe Company B, going back to my hypothetical of Company B being the non-survivor, maybe it owned other entities. And now, what are we going to do about that? Are we going to reassign those companies to the survivor company? Are they owned by a different subsidiary?

And so we built this workflow tool, which we'll demonstrate, that allows our clients to really kind of create that merger transaction history visibility and transparency, but then also do some of the necessary cleanup. And there's also an ability to do a name change. So maybe that survivor company, in my example, is going to do a name change as a consequence of the merger filing. And so on the fly, all integrated, not having to jump from screen to screen to screen, in one place, through one natural workflow, our clients can update that information as they go.