Transform Global Subsidiary Management with CSC

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Caitlin: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Transform Global Subsidiary Management with CSC." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today are John LaPalomento, Sebastien Gaddini, and Rogier Bronk. John is a global subsidiary management services consultant. He has been with CSC for over nine years. John works with GSM prospects to present an accurate and clear scope of services and remains in contact with them as the overall relationship manager for all GSM clients. Sebastien is the Director of Global Subsidiary Management. He's an industry expert driving the strategic direction of the business and further expanding CSC's service offerings and global footprint. Rogier led the commercial rollout of Global Subsidiary Management equivalent at Intertrust in the Americas and has over 20 years of experience in providing solutions to the organizations with large, multi-jurisdictional entity portfolios.

And with that, let's welcome John, Sebastien, and Rogier.

John: Great. Thank you so much. We want to thank everybody for joining us regardless of where you are around the world. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you for sharing your time with CSC today. My name is John LaPalomento. As was stated there, I am one of the senior consultants for our suite of Global Subsidiary Management services, and we look forward to exploring this with you today.

For today's agenda, first we're going to talk a little bit about CSC. One of the things we're going to focus on I'm going to go ahead and share the surprise here, we've been celebrating for the last month, of course, our acquisition of the Intertrust Group. So we'll be talking a bit about that acquisition.

We're going to focus on global corporate governance around the world. We're first going to talk a bit about the landscape of the industry, what you'll come to expect, what has been the norm, and how we really pioneer change in the industry. We're going to talk about the change, the challenges of managing a multinational entity portfolio. This is certainly a hot topic for so many of our clientele. Of course, as a global service provider, we see clients of all shapes and all sizes, and many times they're coming to us for information and knowledge about managing multinational entity portfolios. In many cases, they have a wide footprint around the globe, and we're here to help. We're going to talk a little bit about the challenges that are seen in that space.

Of course, we're going to focus today largely on CSC's Global Subsidiary Management solution being a centralized approach to corporate secretarial governance that's highly malleable and really here to meet the needs of our clients around the world.

And lastly, we're going to finish with Q&A. I encourage everybody to use the Q&A widget that you have access to within the platform. Feel free to put your questions in there. If your question is extremely relevant at the time that we're speaking about something, we may go to that question live in the moment, or we may save questions to be answered later in the event. So don't feel that you have to wait. If a question is stimulated by way of our conversation, please take full advantage of the Q&A widget.

So as I had already mentioned during the agenda, we are so proud that two wonderful companies are coming together. Of course, CSC has such a rich legacy working not only here in the U.S. but around the world. CSC's 120 plus legacy is now joined with this wonderful relationship, not relationship, two plus billion dollar acquisition of the Intertrust Group. Intertrust, of course, a pioneer in global services, trust and fiduciary services, and relevant to this call, of course, global corporate secretarial services. Together we're a powerhouse, and it's a relationship and an acquisition that we've been celebrating internally here, sharing with our clients, singing it from the rooftops.

Together, our company, our one company now has doubled in size, having over 7,500 employees around the world on 5 continents around the world. We've added an additional 80 local offices to CSC's portfolio of offices around the world, combining a 200-year history, world-class client services, and very importantly we're still the same CSC that our clients know, respect, and love. We're still a privately held company, but we're still professionally managed.

We now have even greater expertise around the world, and most importantly I think to know is that this is a true commitment to CSC's global expansion. For such a long time here in the U.S., with our founding in 1899, we had really pioneered U.S. services, U.S. registered agent, annual report services, business licenses.

Of course, make no mistake that we've been working internationally for over 50 years. We're no strangers to the international space, really rolling out and focusing our efforts on our global corporate secretarial services over the past decade. I'm happy to have been a part of that from the very beginning in my 13-year history here at CSC. But now we've bolstered this service so much by way of this acquisition, bringing our own local experts and new members to our team. I'm so happy to be able to introduce some new members of our team here today.

I'm sure there are plenty of questions about the acquisition and about new services that are now available here at CSC, and I'll always encourage everybody to reach out to a member of our Customer Service team. Or if you do have a client solutions manager, if you're an existing client of CSC, please make that connection, ask those questions. We're very proud of this acquisition, and we're certainly happy to explore this further with you.

So let's talk a little bit about the global solutions that we'll be chatting about today. And actually what we're focusing on this slide are some of the places where the acquisition has bolstered our holdings. A big part of that, of course, is in our Global Capital Markets Division here at CSC, offering trust and fiduciary services around the world. Now this, of course, is an area where CSC had offered services, but Intertrust has been and continues to be a global leader in this space. This makes us so strong, bringing our service offering together in the global capital markets arena.

Fund solutions, again our global financial market solutions and funds services is such a big part of our offering. And again, this acquisition more than just bolsters what CSC already had. This is adding to our world-class services in a way that we've never seen before.

Today's focus, of course, will be on global subsidiary management, which is our centralized and simplified approach to corporate secretarial governance in over 145 countries around the world. This is where my area of expertise lies. I work daily helping prospective clients and current CSC clients understand exactly what we do and how we do it when it comes to our suite of Global Subsidiary Management services. And I'm also here to understand the unique needs of our clients.

Global Subsidiary Management truly is bringing together a centralized approach by way of a unified team with hubs for the service out of our Wilmington, Delaware headquarters, our European headquarters out of London, and our Asian headquarters out of Singapore. Of course, we'll be expanding on this much, much more.

A little bit about global corporate governance, the industry landscape. And I'm happy to introduce my new colleague and friend, Rogier.

Rogier: Yeah. Thank you, John. It's interesting, I'm looking back at the poll. I was actually expecting those numbers simply because if you look at the global corporate governance industry landscape, while ESG has taken over the [inaudible 00:08:18] transformation in most organizations simply because most organizations assume that in-house legal teams have successfully implemented this by now, we still see an increase in requests for support with corporate governance as a result of an increased workload.

The pandemic has actually resulted in smaller in-house legal teams. The complexity of the regulatory landscape, especially in the international arena has prompted many in-house legal teams to also look again at partnering with a global provider. So that's why I want to look at the next slide, which goes into U.S. simplicity versus the cross-border complexity.

I'm no expert by all means in the U.S. domestic business side as my main focus has always been on U.S. outbound and the international space. But if you look at the differences and I'd like the touch base on the global entity compliance services are broader in scope that fall within the corporate secretary framework. You have to deal with the nuances in this very jurisdiction-specific regulations. It's often not transparent what needs to be done and when.

There's also highly advanced anti-money laundering scope and project. So know your customer. It's the setup of actually partnering with these global firms that might not be so clear if you walk through it. We often get the requests of assisting with KYC when they are moving, when our clients are moving from one to another financial institution.

The ultimate beneficial ownership, while the UK was one of the first ones to implement this in 2016, the majority of the countries in the EU have implemented this. However, Lithuania and Spain have not officially met the 2020 deadline. They do have platforms in place, but it's not officially.

So there are a lot of differences that need to be adhered to. But John, maybe you can tell a little bit more about the U.S. simplicity versus how we look at the international space.

John: Yeah, absolutely. This is a conversation that comes up on a daily basis because while CSC is a global company, I'm stationed, of course, here out of our Wilmington, Delaware headquarters, and largely I'm speaking with North Americans who are working internationally. And the conversation comes up all the time about, well, frankly how simple things are here in the U.S., and sometimes there's an expectation that that same simplicity is true in other jurisdictions outside of the U.S.

I try to frame the conversation that every jurisdiction is different. This is not a matter of services inside the U.S. or I would say responsibilities inside the U.S. and outside the U.S. The truth is this is a matter of corporate secretarial responsibilities inside the U.S. and inside the UK and inside Australia and inside Italy and inside Brazil and inside Japan and so on. There is a certainly a difference, a different companies act in every jurisdictions where you might be working. And if you are an American on this call, it's very easy sometimes to lose sight of what those obligations look like outside of the U.S.

Here inside the U.S., realistically things are fairly simple. Of course, you have an obligation to have a listed registered agent. In just about every state that's a requirement. Of course that is state driven, not country driven, and we certainly hope that you've partnered with CSC to act as your registered agent, where we would have the responsibility, of course, to field service of process and government notifications on your behalf. We're very proud of the digital platform that we've pioneered, same-day, electronic SOP, the delivery of governance mailings in a timely fashion, with acknowledgment and so on.

We're also here to handle your domestic annual report obligations, which is fairly simple and unique by jurisdiction. But what you don't see here in the United States, of course, are requirements, unless you're in a heavily regulated arena, requirements for things such as annual general meetings. There's no requirement that your board of directors gets together and memorializes that by way of written minutes or consents. There's no requirement that you maintain your physical minute books in a specific location. In many cases, there's no real requirements about recording in some cases.

These are all things that you will see around the world, and quite frankly for a lot of private American companies, there is a feeling of anonymity, where outside of the United States in every jurisdiction and of course CSC working as your service provider we're going to have obligations to collect due diligence about your entities. Now that's going to change here in the U.S. I encourage everybody to look up the U.S. Transparency Act that is coming your way, certainly getting ahead of that. But the way things currently are, it's fairly simple in the U.S., and that's so different as to your obligations around the world, where you do have requirements for physical minute books that are maintained somewhere, where you do have obligations for regulated shareholders meetings, directors meetings, the proper lodging of those minutes, annual account filings, and in many cases even appointments that satisfy requirements for residency within a jurisdiction.

Rogier: Yeah, thank you, John. And as mentioned, the complex regulatory landscape that is changing quite often and having difficulty to accessing that local expertise is a recipe for disaster. You know, it's extremely difficult for in-house legal teams who manage those large portfolios, as we saw earlier in the poll, to keep up to date with any changes in local legislation that might affect the entity and the good legal standing of that entity in each of the jurisdictions that they are operating in.

You know, a change in requirement to have a majority resident directors in certain jurisdictions or six months from now, but also simply adding a third director in Spain, now you become a board, which triggers the fact that you need to appoint a chairman or secretary are all changes that are logic results of doing business internationally. While all providers have a fiduciary duty to inform their clients, it's often done through newsletters and mailings, email blasts, etc. And you, as the client, need to extract the information that changes the good legal standing of your entity.

Often in-house legal teams that we have seen before have decreased in number. Their workloads have expanded. Also their tasks have increased. This all contributes to again a recipe for disaster if you are not informed well.

So it's most important that you find out on who to partner with, who is the best partner for you in your particular case, someone that at least provides its clients with proactive information about these changes, but also provides you information through subject matter experts, for example, with the change of the board in Spain that I just mentioned.

But here you see a few of those challenges that are international. We touched base on the complex regulatory landscape, but also difficulty in accessing local expertise. And these are the most common ones that we bump into. But I think, Sebastien, you might want to speak about some of those from an operational level. Sebastien, over to you.

Sebastien: Yes, absolutely. So you said it well. I think it's getting more and more complex, especially the more you have entities in more countries. I would mention a few challenges that we don't necessarily see at the very beginning is around the inconsistent service level, for example.

When you go abroad and you start having multiple vendors, well, first of all, they might refer to, they might have a different terminology for services. They might have a different pricing. They might have a different way of working. And you need to adjust to that. So if you do business in 50 countries, well, now that's 50 different vendors you have to deal with, and you multiply all of that.

One thing that will become very, very I would say a tricky is the KYC sharing with these multiple vendors. We saw in the last few years leaks in the past, in the news, and obviously no one wants to be on these papers. The more you have vendors around the world, the more you expose yourself to share critical information to multiple people. So you multiply the risk of having a leakage here of sensitive information.

There is maybe one example I want to give as well that I have seen in the past. When you go abroad, it's very difficult to anticipate everything, and very often we or sometimes we hear some clients saying, "Hey, I come to you because I don't know what I don't know basically," and that's what we're here for.

I'll give you an example that happened in a different country at a different time. I was at a different employer. But we had one global client that wanted to acquire a business in Southeast Asia, and they did a lot of the work internally. There's one thing they didn't anticipate was the HR aspect that you see here on that slide. And basically, because of the type of acquisition they were making and the way they were structuring this and the appointments they were making there, they had about 50% of their workforce over there in that country that immediately, as a result of the acquisition, they immediately lost their visa status. They were immigrants there, and they didn't anticipate that. The reason for that was that they didn't have the right network of vendors and support in that country that could have helped them. And I can guarantee you that for any employer whatsoever when you get into a country and then from one day to another half of your workforce is gone, that's a real challenge.

So sometimes there are little things that you don't anticipate, but they have an enormous impact on your business. All the others are pretty obvious, I would say different time zone, different language, different cultures, etc. But it depends on the industry. It depends on where you go. More and more you would see KYC and banking and legal requirements are being more and more of the hot topics of course.

John: I'll jump in real quickly and say, Sebastien, you touched on briefly one of the most common challenges that I hear on a daily basis from our discussions is just managing multiple vendors around the world. So while there's all of these very important moving targets around the world, if you're trying to do that with a plethora of different, a fractured network of vendors, it makes it extremely challenging. Of course, we're going to talk about how CSC can centralize your efforts there. Rogier?

Rogier: Yeah. Thank you, John. Let's look at a few general considerations. And while we actually have come up with these bullet points that we're missing actually three, which is the top three for most in-house legal teams or organizations, which is cost reduction, cost reduction, and cost reduction. And we always laugh about that in our conversations with our clients because that's their main goal, cost reduction.

Obviously, resourcing and budget falls under that, but the main talking points initially are, "We need to get this done on a very tight budget. What can you do for us?"

So if we then look at the remaining bullet points there, it all makes sense to me because legal in-house teams are a cost to any organization, which means that getting the service on a global level for the most cost-effective price will really put you up in the ranks internally. However, number of legal entities, is it really necessary to, for example, acquire a very expensive entity management system that you can pick off the shelves and make it your own, or can you partner with a global provider that has an entity management system, like CSC?

Last bullet point, technology. What can it do for you? Are you a startup and would you like to outsource your entire legal operations to a company like CSC Global, that can grow with you in any of the jurisdictions that you might expand to, from formation of the entity, annual compliance, as well as any ad hoc service request within not only the corporate secretarial services but also with accounting and payroll, treasury and escrow services?

So it depends a little bit on where you are. So number of legal entities is extremely important to make that decision. We often see clients come to us that are in the 25, 30 entity realm internationally and say like, "Okay, we hit a wall. How do we move here, because it comes very cumbersome and difficult to keep up with the regulatory changes?"

Jurisdiction of incorporation and foreign qualifications. Where do you want to operate? How difficult is it to set up an entity? Do you need local expertise? Are there substance requirements? Is it a highly regulated jurisdiction, like Luxembourg, in the Netherlands? Do you require additional assistance on, like I said earlier, outside corporate secretarial service package, on accounting, on payroll, etc.?

So which level of support do you really need? Do you have legal team members sitting in various jurisdictions or regions around the globe that can assist you with maintaining your entities? Or do you have a large in-house legal team for the larger organizations listening to this webinar, that actually want to ensure that the 5% or 10% that each of those individuals support the organization to keep the entities in good legal standing and decrease the level of involvement have actually these high paid in-house attorneys focus on the strategic performance of the company and not so much on the administrative burden of keeping the entities in good legal standing?

So material properties of the legal entity, as mentioned here, speak for themselves.

And obviously, the last bullet point that I touched base on, entity management systems. There are quite a bit out there in the market. Sometimes it might actually be most easy to have your service provider also provide the entity management system. For those who are already a client with CSC and are on the platform from CSC, now with the expansion of and the global reach that we have as a combined company, together with Intertrust, we can also service your entities globally and provide that level of transparency on your statutory information for all these entities globally while you still have your single point of contact here in the Delaware office in Wilmington.

Obviously, Sebastien can talk about that later, that we also follow the sun principle, and we have hubs in the APAC and EMEA region to support you as well. So basically, it comes down to: How are you organized internally? What are your current requirements, but not only your current, also your future requirements? Are there any projects on the horizon, acquisition that you need assistance with?

So being flexible as a partner to your organization is crucial. Having that level of transparency, the proactiveness of informing you about changes and legislation and other items that might occur due to the change in your portfolio are extremely important in choosing a provider.

Let's cross this conversation into the CSC Global Subsidiary Management solution. Sebastien.

Sebastien: Perfect. Thank you, John. Before we start with the solution, I just want to make a comment on the poll, which is sort of 70%, the 70% result of lack of in-country expertise. And I just want to point out that the Intertrust acquisition is extremely beneficial to us and our clients from that standpoint, because it's adding about 4,000 people that are experts in their region, in their country. So that's a big, big workforce that is being added to the CSC family, and that will be addressing this concern immediately. So I just wanted to point that out.

The solution now. So what is GSM? In fact, how do we work? So our solution will allow you to enter new markets and remain in good standing wherever your business is taking you. In fact, we're here to take away the burden of managing global subsidiaries so that you can focus on your core business.

With CSC, you'll be able to work with one provider, with a proactive, centralized CSC workflow, and a dedicated team in your time zone. Depending on the size and the reach of your portfolio, this dedicated team may be augmented by up to two additional regional hubs providing in the region availability and expertise, like we said before. So we're here to provide you with a follow-the-sun, world-class service.

Service is at the center of everything we do, right? We say service is our middle name. So we treat your business with the same urgency, the same attention to detail, and the same sense of responsibility that we do our own. To achieve that, you'll have access to in-country expertise and an experienced and tenured staff that will ensure that you are compliant with the latest regulations around the world.

So how do we make all of that function? Well, with technology. Our award-winning technology solution CSC Entity Management provides an automated and centralized view of your data and documentation in real time. It can also be configured to meet your specific needs. And, of course, it is backed by stringent data security protocols. Nowadays it's a must.

And last, but not least, simplification. We are here to make your life easier and to take on the administrative burden of your corporate secretarial functions. Also our centralized, flat rate invoicing eliminates billing headaches, budget uncertainties that may otherwise come with paying hourly rates in various currencies.

The Global Security Management Service Model now. What is our secret sauce? What is our recipe? So I would say that what differentiates us is how we deliver services to our clients. You always have, of course, the front end, the entity management people helping you. They're on the phone with you, per email. But in fact, we are here, there's tons of people in the background that you don't see that are very essential to the business.

Our goal is to become an extension of your team, to take away the corporate secretarial burden so that you can focus on your core business. We are not simply pushing the burden from you to us without having the flexible and efficient way of handling complex tasks on a global scale. This alone wouldn't work, and that's why we have a specific process in place, internal processes, internal support team that you might not see, but they are essential to the business and to the service delivery.

So we have a completely different approach to global [inaudible 00:31:19]. Our teams are spread among three hubs — the Americas, the U.S. here mainly in Wilmington, Delaware, the Europe, EMEA Hub, and APAC. All three connected, working together. Depending on your preferences, for example, where your headquarters is located. So depending on your preferences, a primary hub will be designated.

This primary hub will be your first stop for everything you need. And its capabilities and global reach will be augmented by the other two hubs. So you always get regional experts helping you when needed. Two people in the primary hub plus one in each regional hub will compose your dedicated team. So, in fact, you always know who's handling your file. It might not necessarily be one single person depending on the size of the portfolio, but you have a team of experts and that's the team that is helping you every single day around the world.

Of course, if your portfolio is on the smaller side, you might prefer having only one person in one hub being your single point of contact, and that is absolutely fine. We will adjust based on your preferences.

The dedicated team will be your voice, eyes, and ears towards all foreign offices. You won't need to pick up the phone 50 times across multiple time zones. We have the people. We have the internal processes, a strong internal support team, and we also have the technology to do that for you efficiently.

Let's look at the CSC advantage now. A few differentiators here. I'd like to highlight some of them.

The relationship with CSC starts with contracting and KYC. This will be your very first experience with us, so of course we're determined to get it right. When dealing with multiple vendors around the world, we touched on that a little bit earlier today, I want to deal with multiple vendors around the world, contracting and KYC can become a real burden, with several contracts to review, negotiate, sign, and your very sensitive KYC information given multiple times to multiple third parties, which can of course raise some privacy and confidentiality concerns.

At CSC, centralization is the key word. Your primary hub will centralize contracting and KYC onboarding. You need to review and execute only one set of contracts and provide KYC documentation only at once. We're here to help you. We're not here to make your life any more difficult with duplicated requests. So that's something that is truly important to us, to have a centralized approach for service delivery.

Our invoicing, like I said before, is flexible as well. Whether you're paying one single bill to CSC US, or it needs to have invoicing broken down for each subsidiary, your primary hub will be centralizing all invoicing for your convenience so you don't get bombarded by 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 different invoices coming from tons of vendors. So there won't be any issues with invoices coming sporadically and in different formats.

Our follow-the-sun model will allow you to get support from our experts around the clock, our local experts, regional experts. And we saw how important it was in the poll taken previously. Seventy percent were saying that it is a concern, it is an issue for them.

And what I mentioned here, it seems like a detail, but it's in fact extremely important. We are a privately owned company since 1899. And we've been built on long-term partnerships. Being a private company also makes us a flexible organization to accommodate your needs. No customer is too small. No customer is too big for us. We're here to scale with you geographically, but also in terms of the extent of services we are providing.

Last, but not least, we're a service company, yes, but we're being powered by an award-winning technology. We have a very comprehensive offer of services, even more now with Intertrust, a global footprint that can help you everywhere in the world. There might be very, very few exceptions, maybe dictated by regulatory obligations. But in general, we can help you everywhere in the world. And we have a highly skilled, professional, proactive and dynamic approach to the business.

How is it to work with CSC also in terms of the services that we can provide to you? I will hand it over to you, John, to tell us more about the intake services that we can provide at GSM.

John: Sebastien, thank you so much. And everybody, we're going to be fairly abridged with this discussion of services. This is nothing more than an introduction today. But we certainly look forward to exploring this further with you specifically. So always feel free to reach out to your customer solutions manager or member of our service team here at CSC.

I'm going to start talking, if we talk about these services chronologically, the very first thing we will talk about is intake and the transfer of services over to CSC. This is an integral part of what we do because this builds the foundation for your ongoing services.

Now, first of all, transferring entities looks different in different jurisdictions. In some jurisdictions, we will actually be facilitating a change of appointments, perhaps taking on appointments of registered office, company secretary, moving physical minute books and the like. In some jurisdictions, it's fairly simple. We may just take on the services from that point moving forward and let the incumbent provider know.

But in all cases, we have due diligence to collect. I would assume that most of our audience today is familiar with the concept of KYC or know your customer due diligence, and, of course, we have obligations to collect that. And frankly, this is the heaviest lift that our clients have when it comes to the transfer, and we simplify this further than many organizations by way of centralization.

Now there's no way to skirt these regulations around the world. But very commonly when working with a service provider, you would have different touch points and different fulfillment obligations in different jurisdictions. CSC's goal is to centralize the collection of KYC due diligence. Of course, we're going to work within the degree of what's required in country, so there's no way around that. But we're going to make it easy by having a transition project manager who works with you to simplify those processes, to ask for those required documents in a timely fashion, to backfill as is necessary, and to ease your mind when it comes to the collection of KYC due diligence.

In jurisdictions where we are taking on appointments, CSC will facilitate those appointments. Simply we take on the cost of the change of appointments, change of registered office or domicile, change of company secretary. We work with your incumbent provider to move physical minute books if that is the requirement. And this is all set up by way of great communication.

So as you see, the very first bullet here, the kick-off call with your project management team. Some managers will join that call. Oftentimes I will join that call, Rogier will join that call to make sure that we're handing off the services between our sales team and our service team with great communication.

The communication around this transfer is critical. Your project manager who's handling the transfer will clearly delineate what your requirements are and the data that is to be collected from you.

The next part of the transfer is a detailed audit of each of your entities, that we call the corporate health check. In my opinion, this is one of the most valuable tools that we provide for our client base. The corporate health check involves CSC pulling data directly from the public registries in country. So please understand that we are not asking you to turn over rocks to produce this information, but we're going out into the market to gather this information on your behalf.

We're going to understand jurisdictional-specific information, such as identification numbers, the proper spelling of the entity name, or maybe we sniff out a misspelling at the business registry. We'll understand things like the address on file currently and the location of the physical minute books are at least where they're required to be.

We'll understand a complete picture of all of the dates and deadlines for your corporate secretarial obligation. If this is a place where you lack visibility now, we're going to bring that into focus for you.

We're going to understand all of your current appointments on file through the eyes of the business registry. Current officers and directors and jurisdictions where it's available. We'll understand powers of attorney and signing authority, bringing that all to the surface.

We're going to understand critically any deficiencies that exist and if there are remedial actions that should be taken. And, of course, we're here to help with those remedial actions if you see fit.

When all of this is complete, one of my very favorite processes here is we're going to take all of this beautiful, clean, trustworthy data and migrate it into CSC Entity Management at no additional cost to you. So you're going to be starting with a piece of technology that is up to date, with a calendar of events that is real and vetted, with officer and director data that is accurate by way of the corporate secretarial governing bodies in country, and jurisdictional specifics that are populated for you.

And one of the things that's really unique about CSC is the way we bill for these transfer activities. Rather than burying you in a sea of invoices for transfer, KYC and AML collection, change of registered office, change of company secretary, we simplify it with one consolidated invoice that's billed as a corporate health check to make it a much easier process for all of our clients.

Sebastien: Thank you, John. Thank you so much. So I agree with you, these stage, the intake stage is the most critical. This is also when we learn a lot about our customers and we can help them to grow into new markets.

When the intake is done, when the KYC is done, when the portfolio is all checked, then we go into the service, the annual support services, and there you have basically a distinction between the annual compliance, which are things that you know are coming up every year. They are your annual filings. You need to maintain your books. We need sometimes to provide you with an address, the registered office. Some customers also need us to have resident directors, local appointments as well. And this is what we call the annual compliance, the recurring services basically. You know once it's set up at the beginning, this is what you need on a yearly basis, and every year it's just being renewed and at least you know what's coming. We will maintain your books, your shareholder registry, officer and director registries.

Next to that there are the ad hoc transactions, and here it's more, you know, it's unplanned. It's things that are coming up, that come your way, and of course they are they are coming our way. A good example is officer and director changes. Let's say you have one person being a director on the board of your subsidiaries. That person is retiring. Therefore we need to replace this person with another one. So multiple filings will need to be done everywhere in the world where this person, he or she was duly appointed.

You will need support with formation and liquidation of entities. There might be a special statutory filings, ad hoc resolutions that need to be drafted. You might need, for some reason, us to retrieve documents, official documents in country. And now, also going back to AML compliance, there is more and more UBO reporting out there. UK is an example, but there are other countries around the world, Hong Kong, etc., where we actually need to report ultimate beneficial owners. So this is the core of the services that we provide on a yearly basis, on a recurring basis.

Next to that, there are additional specialized services, and I would say these are the services that we can also provide now with the addition of Intertrust, because certain services in the past, like accounting and reporting, tax compliance, treasury management, which is cash management basically managing your local bank accounts for you, these are services that GSM was not providing before.

But now with Intertrust, it is very different because these are core services in the legacy Intertrust world. These are services that they've been providing for decades. They have the right staff, the right people for it. So now we're happy to be able to provide these services to our clients.

And I would say it might not be for everyone obviously, but I would encourage any client that is open to it and that has the corporate secretarial work with GSM to look into the accounting and reporting and the tax compliance. Why? Because in many countries around the world, including the Netherlands, for example, you have what is called transaction monitoring. So when you provide services in the Netherlands, depending on the services you provide, but pretty much everything that is in scope for GSM, you need to provide transaction monitoring, meaning the team over there has to monitor every single transaction that is going through those bank accounts over there. It's nothing very different than cash reconciliation and bookkeeping so to speak. So if you have the corporate secretarial with CSC and you have the accounting elsewhere, you might want to look into consolidating of course, and now that we can provide accounting services because you will be saving time and a lot of money by avoiding duplicating reporting obligations.

So that's one I wanted to point out. But all these services are here to help you now.

So I believe we are now going to the Entity Management software. I'm trying to be mindful of time. And now, back to you, Rogier, if you want to say a few words.

Rogier: Yes. And we have little time left, but, you know, CSC Entity Management system, our platform, an integrated solution to our service offering of global subsidiary management services, I would like to say it's the glue to our operation. But rather than, you know, looking at the benefits that are here on screen, there are other advantages to have an entity management system in place.

The people within the organization that handle compliance, governance, and legal operations are often the most busiest, but also the most interrupted people in the business. Having a single source of truth that is managed by CSC is obviously a good point to start. There are some advantages because you get more time for strategic thinking, using the time more efficient to address other matters that are of strategic importance to your organization. You are able to cultivate better quality entity data.

Simply a single source of truth, having that managed by CSC is key. Sometimes our clients decide to manage it themselves. But if they have multiple users across the entire globe, not everything is being stored in the same way, causing all kinds of issues trying to extract that information when necessary.

You also reduce the risk of compliance for each entity in each jurisdiction. So managing risk or managing entity risk becomes crucial for having an entity management system in place. Our award-winning system, CSC Entity Management platform will assist you with this going forward.