Future-Proof Your Compliance with Business Licensing Technology

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, "Future-Proof Your Compliance with Business License Technology." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today are Calla Heathman and Arianne Turnier. Calla is a sales engineer that supports the Corporate Legal Services Group at CSC and is based in Wilmington, Delaware. Since joining CSC in 2015, Calla has focused on B2B relationship management and consulting to find solutions that best fit the needs of new clients. Arianne is an advocate for supporting the needs of licensing professionals and recognizing the value they bring to their respective workplaces. Arianne has been at the forefront of license compliance technology for 15 years.

And with that, I would like to welcome Calla and Arianne.

Calla: All right. Thank you, Caitlin, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We are really looking forward to discussing CSC's license technology solutions that can help manage your license portfolios more effectively and efficiently.

Before we get started, here's a quick overview of what we will be discussing today. First we are going to provide a little bit of background on CSC and then an overview of the basics when it comes to business licenses, like what they are and when you may need or file them. We'll then move into an overview of our business license solutions and ultimately how CSC can help with licensure, whether you'd like our assistance or you would like to create a better process for yours internally.

We will deep dive into our self-service software License Pro and share how this technology can help you manage your licenses again more effectively from an internal perspective. And we'll also share a screen share of our demonstration with the technology. We'll shift the gears to provide an understanding how CSC's full-service outsourcing solution can show you how we here at CSC can help fulfill the filings on your behalf and also provide technology for oversight to the process and the data that's involved in that.

Lastly, we'll round out our session with a Q&A forum. So if you have questions throughout our time together today, please feel free to send them our way so we have the ability to answer them at the end.

As a quick note, we will also have some poll questions throughout the session. So we definitely encourage your participation to help drive some of our conversation and the focus that is going to be within our platform demonstrations today. So with that being said, let's go ahead and get started.

Like I mentioned, we're going to start with a little bit about CSC and where we are today. We've definitely had a lot of exciting things happening here at CSC. Recently we just celebrated our 125th anniversary, and it's allowed us to strengthen our ability to continue to be the world's leading provider of business administration and compliance solutions. Now with a greater reach than ever and more than 8,000 employees, CSC is truly the business behind business.

Always putting our clients at the forefront of what we do, CSC continues to be a trusted partner for more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies, more than 90% of the Best Global Brands. We have more than 70% of firms on the PEI 300 scale, and more than 10,000 law firms work with us directly.

We are definitely driven by our fierce client spirit. We have market leading expertise and now again that unmatched reach that is able to power every stage of the business life cycle for our partners.

We truly could spend the entire session chatting about CSC, what we've done, where we are. But we definitely would like to shift those gears a little bit into our content for the day. So Arianne, would you mind taking us through just the basics of licenses?

Arianne: Absolutely. Let me go ahead and start by saying business licensing is complicated. You need business licensing for a lot of different reasons. You may need a business license just simply because you're doing business in a jurisdiction. Whether you have a physical location or whether you are generating revenue, doing business varies for some jurisdiction. So 20 years ago, I think doing business really was just do you have a brick-and-mortar. Now doing business really has more to do with in many cases are you generating revenue. So this has changed a lot for companies in the last couple of years, especially in states like Alabama, California, Colorado, Washington, where they're really looking at doing business as creating some kind of business activity. So you don't necessarily have to have an office to need a business license in a locality.

Now sometimes we also see licenses needed because of a product. So you are selling liquor, tobacco, or you have a service, so maybe you offer engineering services, construction services. Now those different products and services, sometimes we don't know that we need licenses for them. Once upon a time, I worked with a client who decided to sell in their convenience stores, they were in a coastal town, and they decided to sell like beach towels and it caused them to need a bedding license in those jurisdictions. And that's kind of a new one for them. So sometimes the products you sell will actually trigger the requirement for licensing. So it's a good thing to look at your marketing team and the folks who decide what's going to be in your locations or in your service books, are those things that trigger licenses? Do we need to have licenses to offer that service or to sell that product?

Last but not least, we oftentimes see licensing for professionals is another area that sometimes again is completely overlooked. So if you have professionals who are either licensed, so like we talked about engineers, pharmacists, security guards, they all have to have their own licensing, and sometimes that licensing is managed by them. But as a company, you need to have those documents organized. We need to know that they are compliant in order for us as a business to be able to file our own company licenses. So making sure that we're tracking and having a plan for professional licenses. And in some cases professionals are important not because they are a licensee who does business for your company, but sometimes they're an individual or a professional who has to be an appointed contact on your license. So they need to have certain types of certifications in order for them to be designated as a rep, a qualifier on your licenses.

So business licensing isn't just I opened a location, I need a business license. Jurisdictions regulate at the state, the county, and the local level for business licensing, and they can vary quite a bit based on the kinds of activities you do as a business.

How can CSC help? Certainly the purpose of this webinar is to show you our technology. So we want to talk a little bit about the technology that we use to support licensing here. Those challenges that you guys just answered in the poll questions give us an idea of where you're all coming from.

So I'm going to jump into just the two areas of business licensing technology that we are going to cover today, and I want to be very clear on the distinction between the two. We actually have two very neat options for everybody.

One of them is do you need help with your in-house process to manage licensing. So we have a self-service option here. That product is called License Pro. It is a software that clients implement in-house. They manage their licenses with that software. It automates the work. It creates workflows, and it's really there to be a self-service tool.

In addition to that, we also are going to be able to show you our full-service outsourcing technology. And what that means is are you a company who really needs to hand this off to another provider so that you are spending less time on the licensing work?

And each company is going to have a different set of needs and may want to do more self-service because their licenses are more heavily regulated, more cumbersome, and you might have other licenses that really, as a company, you say I need to outsource the whole thing. So we're going to cover both of these today. They are two separate technologies, so we'll go ahead and make sure that it's very clear during the presentation which one you're looking at. And after the call, if you have more questions or want to learn a little bit more about either one of these, our team members can reach out to you.

So to get us started, I'm actually going to jump into the self-service license management software first. So again, this would be software that you implement in-house to manage your licensing. Now with the self-service license management software, we're going to be looking at our product License Pro. Okay.

So License Pro is our self-service solution. We've been working with clients on self-service software for almost 20 years for licensing and permit management. So this is always nice to share this with new people who've never seen it before and show you how it works and how it supports our customers. Now some of the things that make the licensing software really important, and if you guys have ever considered licensing software before, there are some really unique features in our product that really allow our clients to get a lot more out of technology.

Number one, our product is designed with a renewal workflow tool. What that means is that you get to design the workflows of how you manage your licensing. We know none of the companies on this call today are going to be the same. You guys are all going to have unique types of licenses, unique types of processes. You're going to be filing in different states and jurisdictions. So license Pro is designed to allow you to say in California, for my pharmacy license, I may file this way. In Texas, for my engineering license, I file this way, and I have a series of different steps and tasks that need to be done for my team members. That can all be automated and scheduled so that we know exactly what to expect every time a filing comes up.

We also have alerts and notifications. The goal here is to make sure that everybody knows what they need to be aware of. These notifications might be things like pending renewals that are upcoming. It could be a notification when something becomes past due. It could be a notification anytime an inspection occurs. It could be a notification when certain tasks are required within a workflow. And they can be sent to the primary licensing team. They can be sent to stakeholders across the company, including your locations.

Now we also have custom workflows. This is a little different than renewal workflows because this helps us manage all the other processes around licensing. And I say that because oftentimes when we think about license management, we think about renewals. But if you're managing licensing, you're probably dealing with new locations, you're dealing with getting new personnel up and running and onboarded. You might be dealing with change of owner, change of officer, different types of reporting requirements, bonds, certificates of insurance, notarization. There are a lot of different processes that support licensing, including dealing with inspections or violations. So we're going to cover all of that today and show you how those custom workflows can help support a renewal management process.

Now we have a lot of automation built into the application, and we're also going to show you things like our dashboard and homepage, which will include KPIs, staying on top of the work, making sure that everybody knows what's pending. There's no surprises.

And last but not least, License Pro also supports integration with other internal systems. What that means is if you want to bring in site data into the system, so you always have your gross receipts or employee count on hand, we're going to be able to set that integration up so that can be fed directly from an internal application. We also have AP integrations. So we have payment processing in the system for check requests, credit card payments, and things of that nature.

So again, moving away from self-service technology, which is License Pro, and looking at if you guys have a team members who really you need to look at handing this over to another group to do the work for you, this is what Calla is going to cover next is our full-service options.

Calla: All right. Thanks, Arianne. Thanks for that introduction and also just showcasing how License Pro can help organizations get that handle on their license process and maintain that control and all the different moving parts. It's so, so important. Like Arianne mentioned, we are shifting the focus and shifting to how you can actually leverage your partnership with CSC to have CSC become an extension of your team and physically manage the license renewals, a very different perspective, right?

So like she had mentioned earlier, the information we're going to go through, the technology we're going to go through is a completely separate system. It is designed to help gain visibility into what CSC is doing on your behalf. And you'll ultimately notice it is quite more simplistic and maybe even looking like it might be lacking some information, although I promise you it has it. It's just a different perspective on who is managing the work and what's most important for you to see when you are engaged in that outsourcing partnership.

So really to start, again our full-service solution is very different than managing these types of licenses internally. But our full-service option provides you or your organization with dedicated support from CSC to actually help fulfill tracking expirations, getting forms, preparing the forms with standard information that we store on file, getting alerts on maybe things that we might need to collect in addition to what we already know or things that change. And then, ultimately, it's CSC or your account manager physically submitting the licenses on your behalf to ensure that they're making it to the jurisdictions on time and really creating this seamless full process that you have someone here at CSC managing on your behalf.

Again, we do become a true extension of your team. We're managing each stage of the license renewal process for you, and we are tying this together with the technology, right? The idea behind our webinar today is to understand the technology that's involved with working with CSC for license management.

So our technology for outsourcing provides you a fully centralized view of all of your license data that we're storing within what we consider our license portfolio management system. And we gain that information from you directly, and we build this portfolio. So you do get that view of everything that is going to be managed by CSC. The technology creates visibility not only into the licenses you have, but to the process itself by providing real-time status updates of where CSC is in the process of filing a license, what we are doing, maybe what we need you to do, or when we've hit that ultimate goal of submission. It also provides access again not only to the updates and the statuses, but to data and documents, like license applications and license copies that CSC will provide inside your portfolio for you as we complete the filing.

We treat your information like we would treat our own. Arianne mentioned this for the License Pro technology, but it really rings true here as well. We understand that there are different license types that require different types of information, sensitive data, like PII or financials or other items that really probably aren't public knowledge, things you wouldn't put on your state registrations, and that's why we leverage this technology because we have it backed by our security standards, the SOC 2 Type 2 compliance certificates, things like that to ensure that your data is secure when you're utilizing CSC services. But this technology not only keeps your data secure for just your portfolio view, but it also helps us transmit data to and from each other. So you can transmit your data securely to CSC through our data request portal, which is also integrated into our license technology.

And with this option, again CSC becomes your trusted partner as we are really taking on the work for you. Again, that's the biggest differentiator here. We are proactively tracking expiration dates. We are obtaining the forms. We're prepping and identifying the need for updates or different information and submitting those licenses to the jurisdictions or boards or authorities for approval. We do also submit your payments for you. We will log payments inside the system, but we do submit the payments at time of filing to streamline the process. And then we curate all of those records inside of your license portfolio, again truly becoming an extension of your team.

We've got you through the ups and downs of your license seasons. We understand some come due very frequently at the same time, or you might have times throughout the year where there really isn't a lot going on, and this solution will give you that visibility into all of that.