Skip to main content

Business Life Cycle Compliance: Keeping Your Entities and Licenses in Check

Make an inquiry

All fields marked with * are required.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

In the face of a hybrid workforce and increasing regulatory complexities, organizations need the right technology and service to effectively manage their subsidiary governance and licensing needs.

Join us for a free webinar on August 25 to learn about:

  • Shifts in market trends that will impact your legal team’s operations

  • The impacts of various types of transactions on your compliance and licensing needs

  • Best practices to help your team (or teams) work together and stay compliant throughout the entire entity life cycle

Webinar transcript

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, "Business Life Cycle Compliance: Keeping Your Entities and Licenses in Check." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today are Calla Heathman and Andrea Jonaitis. Calla is a sales engineer that supports the Corporate and 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. 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 Calla and Andrea.

Andrea: Hi, everyone. This is Andrea Jonaitis. I'm so excited to be sharing this time with you today. Thanks for joining us.

Calla: And hi, everyone. I'm Calla Heathman. As Andrea stated, thank you for joining us and we are looking forward to discussing the various areas of compliance and how to help manage the ever-changing environment of the business life cycles.

Really before we get started, I'd like to discuss the agenda for today's session. First we will start with a bit of information about CSC and who we are in the marketplace. We also want to talk through the current market environment and how the changes over the last few years are still impacting workflows and conditions today.

We'll focus on some responsibilities of folks who currently manage entity and business license compliance for organizations and also some of those common challenges that they may be facing today. We'll follow up that with a review of industry best practices to assist to make your life easier when working with entity transactions and business licenses. Also how certain corporate transactions can impact business compliance. And then, of course, we're going to focus on how CSC fits into all of this and how we can help streamline these processes along with data.

And then lastly, we'll try to wrap up this session with a quick overview of the technology platforms and really give you a glimpse into how CSC's Entity Management or business license solutions could work for you.

So first, let's start off with a brief background on CSC to get you familiar with who we are, or if you do work with us today or daily, a little bit of a refresher. We are headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, where a long time ago, in 1899, two Delaware attorneys came together to help simplify forming and operating corporations. And that's how CSC was formed. So since then, we've added many offerings and different solutions to support a wide array of customers that range from companies in Delaware, small mom-and-pop shops to large organizations, again across the nation and then even into over 140 jurisdictions worldwide.

And then with this reach, we support more than 180,000 corporate customers to date, which would include 90% of the Fortune 500 companies, in one or more areas of compliance. We're supporting more than 10,000 law firms to date, some of those most prestigious across the U.S., and provide solutions to over 3,000 financial market customers. We are protecting brands in more than 65% of the 100 Best Global Brands around through our security safeguards.

And that's just a little on who we are. But now I will pass things to Andrea for our insights into today's business landscape.

Andrea: Thanks, Calla. So here we are in the middle of 2022 and we're still feeling some of the effects of this pandemic. I think that one thing we really learned from this pandemic is that we can successfully continue to conduct business remotely, and more and more it's looking like this hybrid work model is here to stay.

It's fair to say that the hybrid work model also brings its own set of challenges to organizations. Employees are highly dependent upon having stable internet and network connectivity, and interruptions in that service can halt your business entirely.

Teams are challenged by higher threats of security risks. So there's tons of cyber security risks out there, and they seem to be growing and getting better kind of as time goes on. When you're dealing with sensitive entity information, officer/director details, and other confidential data and documents, these security risks can become even more alarming for organizations.

And perhaps there might be challenges with inaccessible records for a variety of reasons. Maybe hard copy files reside only in the office and are inaccessible when you're working from home. Or teammates and partners are working not just from different locations, but perhaps literally different states, different countries, which can make file sharing a challenge.

The after-effects of the pandemic have also necessitated that teams do more with less. Many organizations continue to feel the pain of the Great Resignation. So in-house legal staff and other teammates are being pressed to add even more to their already stretched thin workloads. It's just a tremendous amount of work being piled onto employees today.

The 2020 Gartner State of the Legal Function Survey found that by 2024 legal departments will replace 20% of generalist lawyers with non-lawyer staff. So this trend of increasing workloads and flat budgets really puts a premium on efficiency. This means that legal departments must improve their processes, their legal technology implementation, and their reporting and analytics and other digitalization strategies to really support this increased workload.

The challenges I just described are also supported in the 2021 ACC Chief Legal Officer Survey. Of 947 participants across 21 industries and 44 countries, the ACC learned some critical insights. First there's a tremendous growth in the presence of the legal operations role. More than 60% of law departments have at least one team member dedicated to legal operations, and this is up nearly 40% from 2015. And 21% of departments have at least four professionals in the legal ops role. So this is really demonstrating a clear and consistent growth in the need for this role to be present for your organizations.

Secondly, we are coming back to this idea of doing more with less. Not only are staff requested to take on increasing workloads, but there's increasing pressure to simultaneously cut costs and save money. Eighty-eight percent GCs in the survey reported that they're planning to reduce overall costs of the legal functions over the next three years, and they're citing pressure from the board and CEO as top reasons for trying to make those cuts.

This will go in hand in hand with the next item on our list, which is that even though cost control is a priority, the most critical need is for legal leadership in initiatives that enable growth and aid strategic risk mitigation. At the end of the day, growth and risk mitigation reigns supreme. Simplifying spend management and automating your non-strategic tasks become even more critical than ever so that your attention can be given to the right areas of your business.

And lastly, there's always challenges with regulatory uncertainty. Local and national governments continue to adjust regulations due to the pandemic and even just as we grow beyond this pandemic. So staying on top of those regulatory changes is crucial so that your organization can avoid penalties and other consequences.

Now we're going to segue a bit to talk about some of the daily responsibilities that are required for successfully managing your portfolio of entities and business licenses. The ongoing daily responsibilities for managing your portfolio can vary so much. In doing less with more, folks are finding themselves in a position of having to manage all of these incredibly different tasks and somehow learning to specialize in all of them. You might have a lot of responsibilities transcending many of these business areas, and you really need to be the authority in them or else risk financial penalties or other consequences.

As you know, there's a lot that goes into staying on top of these entity compliance and business licensing filings. There's always an ongoing cycle of forming entities, amending, merging, or dissolving those entities. And with that, there are filing requirements, renewals to complete, minute books or other documents that need to be organized and maintained, and the list goes on there.

Business licensing is a whole other beast. There are licenses that are industry specific, and localities have different requirements. There are different licenses that are required at the state level versus the county level or other local levels. Really a high degree of research is required to fully understand which business licenses might be required for your organization when you expand your presence into new jurisdictions.

And Calla is really going to dive into this a bit more with us and help us understand not just the research that's required for licensing, but perhaps more importantly how CSC can help you and some best practices for managing those licenses.

Calla: As Andrea mentioned, we're going to dive into a little bit more on how CSC can help in managing licenses moving forward. But before we do that, we want to really look through a couple of challenges alongside of those daily responsibilities and workflows that you might be experiencing.

So Andrea and I always hear about different challenges that our customers may face as they try to navigate those business landscapes either today or in the future. So it's whether they're dealing with lack of resources or the addition of new employees or taking over new tasks, maybe even inability to find records that Andrea mentioned, or pinpointing those changes that can possibly happen throughout the year, really the common denominator is that they're all facing these challenges due to lack of transparency and the collaboration across teams or within a technology platform.

All of the responsibilities that Andrea discussed will eventually more or less intertwine together and have impacts on other departments or other filings, and most of the time there are going to actually be different people or teams managing those areas. So because of this, the major challenge becomes navigating that transparency and trying to understand how entity vitals are impacting your business licenses or even vice versa, you know, getting one license prior to getting something else or needing to manage multiple filings at the same time.

So in most cases what we're seeing is the separation of legal teams by managing just corporate matters, like the forming and qualifying entities or managing annual reports or service of process during that time, while maybe there's another tax division or a finance department tackling licenses. Sometimes there are overlaps. But because there is often separation, there is maybe a lack of coordination between teams that we see. And so what we'll really do is dive into more on how CSC can help eliminate this lack of collaboration and other things later in today's session.

So while transparency certainly is impacting the entity process in many different ways, there's also other challenges that will arise during the business license process specifically. So now business licenses really can mean many things to different organizations or different people.

But it's really important to focus on what CSC considers business licenses or what we focus on, and that's really going to be requirements that fall outside of the secretary of state, like some of the things Andrea had talked about earlier, general licenses for cities or counties or localities, other things for industry-specific licenses, maybe for trades or insurance licenses, food service or restaurant licenses, and everything else under the sun. These specific licenses are really imperative to the business operations, and if they aren't managed properly, there are several and even sometimes severe consequences, like penalties or lawsuits that certainly can be passed along to your legal teams to collaborate, but also even closures or the inability to be completing jobs in different areas for lack of licenses or lack of renewals.

So because every business is different, navigating the regulations may be overwhelming. Ad then the question becomes really are you confident in not only if you are complying today with the appropriate licenses, but even your data, is it accurate? Do you store things? Do you compile copies of the licenses? Andrea had mentioned that sometimes it's where hard copies are being stored today. Are they on-site? Are they in an office? Are they accessible to everyone?

Really not only are you faced with that type of uncertainty, but it's really different than the secretary of state regulations, right? You have about 50, 51 jurisdictions that would mandate some of those filings, kind of easy to find, but within the licensing jurisdictions, there's over about 150,000 filing jurisdictions today throughout the U.S. that you could possibly work with to find a license. And it can become quite overwhelming to even understand everything that you could possibly need to apply for or finding the right authorities to contact.

So beyond licensing and transparency, there is that major issue on collaboration of teams or what we would consider budget ownership. We think about how everyone may have a little piece of the puzzle. Sometimes legal can manage some licenses, sometimes tax, finance, and other folks. So it can become quite daunting as to actually who owns the part of the process for licenses since they typically are considered regulations maybe legally, but then also some of them are considered tax payments. So it can make it difficult to navigate that budget when trying to implement different solutions to solve issues.

So let's switch gears a little bit from challenges and other types of issues and focus on some of those industry best practices, that Andrea had mentioned, that really can help eliminate some of those challenges from your workflows. I think we've alluded to some, if not all of these best practices throughout the session so far, or maybe have at least called to action how not implementing them can impact the business.

But we've really identified four best practices to assist throughout the business life cycle. So let's dive into why these are important to instill in your day-to-day practices. Now all of these here can go hand in hand, or maybe you have one and another or all of them together work perfectly.

But to start, security and having your data and documents in those secure protected areas is going to be the key during this ever-changing landscape of really workflows and security in general. That's going to be most important for the organization.

In our world today, we work with many pieces of data, things like those minute books and corporate data and officer information that Andrea mentioned, other things within the licensing aspect, like employee counts, your revenue figures. And many of these data points are considered sensitive, and they're not necessarily just sensitive digitally but also from that hard copy perspective too.

So, for example, documents and licenses could be in sites or in offices or being stored in employees' homes today, and then you could possibly run the risk of exposure of that information. And other things for filing we may need background checks or Social Security numbers. So it's really vitally important to know where that data and documentation is being stored, but also that you can be able to trust that it's safe and protected not only when it's on the forms but also when you're going to find that.

Part of that security lends to centralization of that data and the ability to provide transparency to those individuals that actually need to be able to access this. So there's also levels of security within transparency because you want the ability to provide access to information, but also maybe not other areas of compliance or not all information or maybe not make it editable or things like that. So this is all something that's able to be achieved by implementing the correct systems to allow for permission structures to increase the usability, collaboration, centralization, and transparency across teams, but also security, right, not allowing folks to have access to certain things that maybe they don't need, but also being able to utilize systems that are keeping that information safe.

So while that security, centralization, and transparency are huge when specifically working in this type of environment, they go hand in hand together, and there's a little bit of an outlier here with knowledge. But we're going to switch gears there. We talked about knowledge and just overall understanding of information that you need to file for transactions or licenses. So it's really just imperative to have the knowledge base or at least know where to find it, right, maybe partnering with CSC when you're faced with these tasks of managing the corporate registration cycles or licenses, just to ensure that that business is staying in compliance.

Andrea: Calla described the intertwined nature of entity life cycle events and alluded to the fact that these events can greatly impact many other areas of your business. So we'd like to briefly take a look at some of these entity life cycle events and talk a little bit about how these events can impact some of the other corporate governance requirements that your teams are responsible for completing.

So first we'll start with forming new entities or registering in additional jurisdictions. That is going to bring, of course, new annual report filing requirements, which can be very different by state. Some jurisdictions, as it relates to annual reports, can keep their deadlines fairly static, like Delaware for example, very static dates and deadlines for those reports. Other jurisdictions can use an entity's anniversary month, for example, as the point in time when those reports are due.

Simultaneously we need to understand the business licenses that are required by those new jurisdictions, again at the state, county, or local levels. That's where that research might come in to get your arms around what's required and do I have the licensing that is necessary when you are expanding your business into those additional jurisdictions.

Inevitably there's officer or director changes and possibly name changes. These requirements for implementing these changes domestically in the United States are fairly standardized. But when we start talking about global markets, jurisdictions around the world, the complexity of effecting those changes starts to grow and vary significantly. There are a lot of jurisdictional nuances that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction around the world. Some jurisdictions impose strict timelines for when these changes have to be filed. There can be some pretty hefty final fines and penalties associated with not meeting those dates or deadlines or those time frames for filing your office or director changes or implementing those business registry updates.

It's very easy to forget that officer or director changes can also directly influence and affect your business licenses. If the signer for a license has changed, that old license might need to be amended or even cancelled or refiled in order to maintain compliance within that jurisdiction and to remain in good standing.

Other common transactions include M& activities. Acquiring those new assets requires organizations to restructure and understand how those new entities fit into their existing portfolio and ownership structures. Being able to easily and efficiently produce org charts is essential for your organization, and those org charts are usually required prior to engaging in any of those M&A activities.

Inherited entities also means taking control of the corporate governance for those entities, the filings, the licenses, again getting your arms around what's currently in place or what should be in place. Even when those acquired entities are in great shape, it can still just be really tough to jump into managing those entities right in the middle of the life cycle. So it's never easy to just acquire those assets and have to pick up right in the middle to ensure that those entities remain in good corporate health.

Finally, there's a slew of requirements necessary when you're winding down entities. You need to make sure all of your annual reports are completed, all of the dissolution or withdrawal documents are filed to make sure, again, that you don't incur any penalties. You might need to terminate any licenses that you had in those jurisdictions before the entities could be considered fully wrapped up.

So there's a lot of kind of bleed over, as Calla mentioned, where these different transactions are really going to impact other areas of your business and you need to be cognizant of how those are kind of intertwined or dependent upon each other.

That takes us into how CSC can help. CSC is well positioned to be able to help organizations tackle all of their corporate compliance needs and their business licensing needs. So Calla and I are excited to share with you the ways that CSC can really help you as you navigate through all of these different requirements.

CSC is really unique in the marketplace. We are not just a service company and not just a technology company, but really the perfect blending of both of those. We have world-class technology that pairs with our expansive service offering to provide our customers with really a complete solution, and our solutions are carefully protected by the most stringent security mechanisms. Calla started to talk a little bit about the way that we support customers that have even some of the most highest and most restricted security mechanisms.

All CSC corporate compliance solutions are powered by our CSCNavigator platform, which is our online legal and compliance portfolio management system. But this system really transcends just beyond entity management and business licensing, which Calla and I are talking about today. It provides a truly centralized repository across all of your business areas. The technology is partitioned, and it offers administrators the ability to be really selective with which areas of the technology their teammates or their partners can see while keeping everything accessible with just the click of a button for the folks that need to have access to these multiple areas across your business.

As a registered agent, of course CSC receives and processes service of process documents, and we provide technology and resources for managing your litigation, your garnishments, and your other legal documents. We offer the ability for electronic same-day delivery of service of process electronically within the SOP section of the CSCNavigator platform.

Any of the annual reports that we file for you, some of you might outsource the completion of those reports to CSC. When we do that, we're managing all of the officer or director filings within all of those states, jurisdictions so that you don't have to worry about missing them.

The Entity Management solution can detail those appointments, provide you with access to the filings and other minute books and documents that are stored for each of your entities. Critically, the Entity Management system can also automate the production of your graphic or text-based org charts or provide you with alerts and reminders for your filings and other deadlines.

Some folks might have a need for Matter Management, which is a solution that provides robust tools for tracking and managing what we think of as matters, things like contracts, real estate, claims, deals, intellectual property. Really anything could be a matter.

As it relates to business licenses, Calla is going to talk a little bit more about how CSC can automate and assist with the maintenance of your licenses, the research requirements and making sure that you have the right licenses in place and you're not over-licensed or maybe carrying more licenses than are necessary than some of the jurisdictions. But at the end of the day, all of that licensing data, the documents, they can all be viewed in that centralized manner within our CSC platform.

And finally, the management of entities in other jurisdictions around the world, it's crucial to have that full picture. So CSC's Global Subsidiary Management services provides a centralization and proactive handling of all of the corporate secretarial requirements in all of those jurisdictions around the world, and you see the automated flow of data and documents from those services again flowing into the CSCNavigator platform.

So it really serves as kind of a one-stop shop where you're able to have accessibility across all of those business disciplines and really centralize that data and documentation across those areas and providing the access in that really secure and encrypted environment under the control of your administrators.

We're about to transition into our demonstration portion so that you can take a peek at CSC's technologies that support our services in just a moment. But I'd like to take a quick second to highlight really what makes CSC's Entity Management solution different.

I mentioned CSC is not just a service company and not just a technology service. We offer a complete integration of our technology with our compliance and filing services. So you're going to find that data and documents and records and files from our services will flow automatically into the system. Your organization has the benefit of sitting back and realizing that automation and having those data and documents flowing in real time, transcending time zones and jurisdictional boundaries and making a really collaborative environment for you where you can see the results of the service that CSC provides to you.

More than that though, the platform is also highly intuitive, and it provides a robust level of customization and configuration so that our clients can actually take control of the features and capabilities inside of the system and really build on top of that which we automate in the system for you. So you can create an unlimited number of custom data fields to capture things like unique entity vitals or custom fields, jurisdictional details, custom officer or director appointment information, capital and ownership. There's also other capabilities, like managing your appointments of officers or directors, building your org charts, calendaring out your dates and deadlines, building your minute books, and managing your documents, text search ability to help you find your documents. So there's definitely a lot for us to dive into in the demo. I'll show you in just a minute how you can manage those types of items proactively on your own.

And we alluded to our security and that security is paramount. We protect all of our technology solutions with the highest levels of security and availability. We are SOC-2 Type 2 compliant. Our servers are ISO 27001 certified, dedicated only to CSC, accessible only by CSC. We have strategically positioned our servers so that they can't be impacted by natural disaster or other issues. I mentioned we have some of the highest and most stringent security protections and processes in place because your security, your privacy, and your protection is of the utmost concern and importance to CSC.

Our pricing model is a little bit different in that it is inclusive of everything that you could need. So across our technologies these systems provide access for an unlimited number of users. These people can be internal to your group. They can be outside of your organization if that makes sense for you. So these folks could be outside counsel, partners, auditors. Anybody that might make sense for you to give access to your entity vitals and details, your licenses and documents, you can permission those folks into the system.

We also include all system features. We don't have this concept of packages or tiers to determine which features you get within our systems. So in Entity Management, you get all of the capabilities.

We also don't charge for any of the enhancements. We have a dedication to refreshing our technology and releasing new features and tools regularly. We do so about every three or four months on average because we want the system to grow with your evolving needs over time. When we release new features and tools and capabilities, they flow to you automatically through the browser-based tool, rather than requiring you to pay money for upgrades or requiring you to complete some complicated, fancy installation processes. We have a multi-year road map, a developmental road map that details all of the upgrades that we have planned and that we're working on or have in flight.

Lastly, our pricing model is also inclusive of unlimited users, I'm sorry I said that, unlimited training and support. We want to make sure that everyone understands how to use our technologies and maximize their benefit regardless of how often training is required or how much support is necessary. We really want these technology tools to be utilized by your teams for many years to come, and we want to remove any of the roadblocks that might be in place that would prevent you from utilizing our tools or continuing to use them for many years.

And finally, before we get into these product demos, Calla is going to wrap us up with sharing the ways that CSC can help you with the management of your business licenses.

Calla: Well, thank you, Andrea, for walking us through all of the areas that CSCNavigator supports and explaining how it can integrate different functions into just one platform and also highlighting how Entity Management could be a great addition to any organization that's really looking to manage entity vitals and data in a more strategic way.

So let's switch gears a little bit to the licensing side of how CSC can add efficiencies to your license workflows today. Really, like Andrea had mentioned, CSC is a service and technology company, and within our Licensing Division and service I think it's really a true marriage of the two of those things together. You'll be able to rely on CSC's License Team for support and then also utilize technology to view data and documents and the statuses of your licenses along the way as we are supporting your renewable filings.

So before we move into the product demonstration, CSC really has two main areas of focus when it comes in that Licensing Division, the first being the research and the concept of having CSC being able to provide knowledge of licenses offered in the jurisdictions that are going to be issuing them. We have two main research offerings to help identify possible licenses that could impact your business.

The first really relates to brand-new operations or new locations that we would consider new location research. Whether you're moving into a new physical office space or occupying a building or brick and mortar really, or you're offering new products or existing products in new places or services and new states, those cities or localities, you have the ability to lean on CSC to prepare a research package that identifies those licenses that would be issued by the authorities and that you may need to comply with so you can feel confident that you're starting off on the right foot as you're opening those new locations. And again, that's having CSC take those workflows off of your desk again maybe to focus on other areas. As Andrea mentioned, we've seen a lot of folks have more and more tasks throughout the years being put on them, and then this is something that you can have CSC support when moving into those new jurisdictions.

We can then also consider that same scenario but actually for where you're currently operating. So in those localities, maybe you're unsure of what you have or you think that you might be missing something, or Andrea had mentioned earlier being over-licensed. Maybe you think you have something that you actually wouldn't need. So CSC does have the ability to uncover not only the requirements, but instead of just stopping there, we can help identify those licensing requirements and the data that you currently have on file, things that you've already complied with, license numbers, expiration dates, or the vitals of that license, if it's inactive or active with those appropriate authorities. We can verify if there are gaps in the license coverage. And then, oddly enough, sometimes again you may have something that you might not need to maintain and you can divest of.

And this is what we would consider our existing license research. It's more of a comprehensive auditor overview of not only the requirements but what you have met from a requirement standpoint and the data, what you may have missed and may need to consider obtaining, and then also those things that you could possibly not need and can divest of.

Alongside of our research offerings, we do have a full suite of outsourcing services. So that second facet is having CSC take on the management of those current renewable licenses. This helps really solve those issues like the lack of centralization of your data, transparency into what you have, missed filings possibly, or any penalties that maybe you could think of.

Our outsourcing solution really does pair that CSCNavigator technology, like Andrea had called to action, with that dedicated support of our Licensing Team and an account manager here to provide the administrative assistance of gathering applications for you, preparing and pre-filling applications that we do have, the notices to you of any additional data points that we need with checklists, submissions of those licenses alongside of payments, and more or less the recordkeeping through that centralized secure license portfolio to give you access to the copies of your licenses applications and being able to see the status updates there.

So with that the Business License Portfolio system is much like Entity Management in the features and adding into that SOC-2 compliance that Andrea had explained for us and that certificate, making sure that all of that data and the documentation is safe and secure, especially when we're working with things like Social Security numbers or sensitive data on background history or financial information for license filings.

Alongside of that, it also is able to be used for unlimited capabilities of users. So you also have permissionable structures that you can utilize, like read only or read-write access for specific folks. It can even get as granular as drilling down to specific locations that you would like people to be able to see or not to see. So it really does allow for a collaborative workspace to improve not only the teamwork between teams internally, but visibility into everything that you may have, especially in some cases if you are still operating brick and mortar where you have to have these licenses posted on location. It's really expanding the viewpoint that you have into the license portfolio.

So paired with the outsourcing solution, the technology also will help provide real-time status updates that will be visible there for you when you're logging in. It's really to help understand how those filings are progressing so you can see when things are being prepared, when things are being submitted, and then also when evidence is obtained.

We will retain that data within the system and any of the documentation that goes along with the licenses, like application copies or license copies when applicable. And that's to be able to provide you with an active representation today of how your licenses stand and what they look like. But also then we're going to store historical representations of those licenses and their images as well. So as you're working through those license filings yearly with CSC, we're going to transition a lot of that data into a historical representation, and then that way you don't ever have to feel like you have to remove data from that secure environment.

And lastly, I think which is really great about the system itself and really lends to that change in work environment, where you could be working from home or really anywhere in the world today, this is accessible anywhere that you have an internet connection, and it's accessible 24/7. That's really to optimize the way you view licenses and manage data and have the ability to see what is going on.