Compliance Advantage: Consolidate Compliance Needs with CSC

Disclaimer: Please be advised that this recorded webinar has been edited from its original format, which may have included a product demo. To set up a live demo or to request more information, please complete the form to the right. Or if you are currently not on CSC Global, there is a link to the website in the description of this video. Thank you.

Caitlin: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "Compliance Advantage: Consolidate Compliance Needs with CSC." My name is Caitlin Alaburda, and I will be your moderator.

Joining us today are Paul Mathews and David Jefferis. Paul is CSC's Director of Product Management for Service of Process and Representation Services. For more than 20 years Paul has worked with the operations, service, and technology teams that support CSC's registered agent and service of process solutions. David is a Senior Director of Product Management for Global Compliance and Governance Services at CSC in the Wilmington, Delaware headquarters. David is responsible for driving the strategic direction of CSC's compliance solutions. With CSC for over 15 years, he has significant experience providing training, implementation, and consolidative services to clients of CSC Entity Management.

And with that, let's welcome Paul and David.

Paul: Thank you very much, Caitlin. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone, depending on where you're joining us from. My name is Paul Mathews. We want to welcome you and thank you for joining us today as we run through an overview of the advantages to a consolidated approach to meeting and managing your compliance obligations.

I'm going to quickly run through the agenda, and then we'll dive in. So today we're going to start with a quick introduction to CSC. Next we'll talk about the current landscape and some of the challenges that organization face in the marketplace today. Then we'll spend some time on what you should expect from a registered agent service provider. We'll talk about how that provider can support your organization through the complete life cycle of an entity, and we'll spend some time talking about some of the additional services that can expand the role and value that you get from that provider. We'll also put some focus on talking about some of the core responsibilities of an agent, specifically handling with service of process. And finally, we'll close out today's session with a demo of CSC's Navigator platform, and we'll give you a chance to ask questions to clarify or address anything we don't cover in today's session.

With that, let's dive in. I'm going to pass things over to David, and he's going to start with an overview of CSC.

David: Great. Thank you, Paul. And I also want to echo Paul's comments in terms of thanking our audience for taking time out of your busy schedules to join us today. We're really excited for the content that we have to share with you today, and it's really my pleasure to have the opportunity to talk about CSC as an organization.

So for more than 120 years CSC has been the partner of choice for companies around the globe, trusted to handle everything from incorporating companies through maintaining compliance, corporate transactional work, protecting digital assets from the threats of the online world, and really everything in between. CSC offers solutions and technology that keep businesses running, and that allows our clients to really focus on the important work of growing their business. CSC is globally headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, and we are a privately held organization. We just celebrated the one-year anniversary of the biggest acquisition in the history of our company. In November of last year, CSC acquired the Intertrust Group, which has doubled the size of our company as far as employee count is concerned, and also it has dramatically increased our global presence as far as the number of countries where CSC has a physical presence.

And there's a fair number of stats here on this particular slide. The one that I'm really proud of is that more than 90% of the Fortune 500 utilize CSC for at least one of our services. And so certainly registered agent is something that we've done for over a century. It's a bit of a calling card so to speak, and we'll talk about that today as Paul mentioned. But we're also going to talk a bit about services that we can offer beyond registered agent and how they really tie together very nicely.

And so with that, I'm going to go ahead and provide a little bit of an overview of CSC services. There's certainly too much here to cover in one webinar. I think the takeaway from this slide is that we have a tremendous breadth and depth of services, going well beyond a registered agent.

Now for the purposes of our webinar today we're really going to be focused on the first area, which is business administration and compliance. But effectively what you're seeing on this slide is really what are five distinct business units in CSC as an organization, so business administration and compliance, fund solutions, transactions and lending, domain names and brand protection, and capital markets. Really, again, it's in that top left where you're seeing things like registered agent. We're going to talk about entity management, global security management, service of process, management of business licenses, and more. So that's really the area where Paul and I focus, and that'll be again what will really revolve the majority of our conversations around today as a part of our webinar.

Before we go further, I'll turn things back to Paul to talk a little bit about the current sort of climate that corporate legal departments find themselves in, in managing compliance.

Paul: Thank you, David. So for companies that do business across multiple jurisdictions, one of the major decisions you'll have to make is whether you use a single provider or decide to spread things over a group of different agent providers. As you think about that, let's talk through some of the challenges you can face if you decide to spread this across multiple vendors.

First, one of the things you have to think about is that managing vendors can be very time consuming, and the more vendors you have, the more that starts to become a full-time job. And the time you put into managing those vendors eats away at the efficiency that outsourcing is supposed to provide you to begin with. Additionally, each of those vendors only has insight into a small sliver of your overall picture, so they aren't going to be positioned to offer any broader insights or to help you avoid making the same mistakes in different jurisdictions.

The next thing you have to think about is the technology that comes along with these providers. So most service providers are going to include some form of technology to help support the work that they're doing for you. And if you are using multiple vendors, you now have to learn each of those tools and manage switching from tool to tool with no real insight, or I'm sorry no real opportunity to see all of your information in one place.

And then, further, you'll never get the same access to support or attention from each vendor. Each vendor is going to have their own approach to how they provide service. And honestly, you're going to spend as much time trying to hold them accountable to those commitments as you do getting the value and benefits of those services.

And finally, something that can't be ignored and this is perhaps the most critical among all of these is as you splinter your services across multiple vendors, one of the things you're losing is the opportunity to leverage your whole book of business when you're negotiating pricing. So having inconsistent pricing, having inconsistent content and format for invoicing, inconsistent terms, all of that just becomes something that again eats away at your time and attention, and those are things that are too precious to give up easily for things that are not bringing value to you.

So we've entered into an age where almost every corporate law department is faced with an increasing number of compliance requirements that are also increasingly complex to navigate. And most of you are likely being asked to do this with fewer and fewer resources. That just is sort of the name of the game these years. And the expectation is that that shortfall in resources is going to be met with technology and outsourcing. And rather than having to pick and choose which obligations can be neglected, again if you're taking these obligations seriously, you have to prioritize choosing the right vendors and technology to partner with so that they can manage all those obligations effectively and you can keep your eye on the big picture.

And again, what we see here in the graph is as we talk to organizations and we see kind of how they respond to questions about what their biggest challenges are, it's managing those competing priorities. It's having a lack of bandwidth. And again, it's trying to deal with inconsistent processes or antiquated processes. So as the speed of change continues to accelerate, you have to be working in an environment that is built to basically be agile enough to take on those changes and adapt processes and services to meet them. And again, that can be very difficult when you're kind of spreading things around.

So when we think of the compliance space and start talking about the critical vendors in that space, one of those most critical vendor choices that you'll have to make will be your choice around registered agent. So let's start with the basics in terms of what should you expect from your registered agent.

So minimally they need to check the box. They need to provide you with a brick-and-mortar location in every state where you're doing business, and that that brick-and-mortar location has to be staffed and available during normal business hours. And that's primarily to be available for the receipt of service of process. And we'll talk more about service of process a little bit later in the presentation today.

But beyond those minimal check the box obligations, an effective registered agent will not only be able to be there to receive service of process, but they'll also have an effective means for providing you information about those documents and rapid delivery of that information and the corresponding documents. A good agent will also be able to provide you with line of sight and visibility into what's required to maintain your good standing wherever you're doing business. They should be able to provide you with some means of storing critical data and documents related to your entities and service of process. And ultimately, they should demonstrate expertise across this landscape and in all the adjacent services that your organization needs.

So as you start to think about these expectations that you should have for your registered agent, you'll hopefully begin to differentiate among providers that are willing to do this work and those that are actually built to do this work. While you have to at least check the box, you could be getting a lot more for the money that you're spending. CSC specifically has structured our offerings around building a complete compliance solution. And rather than just merely checking the box, we're aiming to deliver additional compliance insight and protections to customers that are using any or all of our services. And we try to pack each of our solutions with both line of sight to the information that you need and also insights relative to that information to help you stay ahead of the curve as requirements change or grow.

David: Before we get into some of the additional services that CSC is able to provide beyond registered agent, we'll spend a slide or two with sort of a 30,000-foot view of what makes CSC a bit different than some of our competitors within the compliance space. And the first bullet point in that orange color I think hits on something really important, which is a truly global provider with a broad range of solutions across the life cycle. And so sort of tying back to my comments earlier about the acquisition CSC completed last year, we have a physical presence in every major economic center. We provide services in over 140 jurisdictions, again with a tremendous breadth of capabilities.

Also that second bullet is near and dear to my heart, which is really kind of a mission of our business unit here within CSC, which is the combination of best-in-class service and award-winning technology in a completely integrated fashion. And so the example that I often share it's sort of a rudimentary example, but I think it speaks to this power is that if you were to engage CSC let's say to form a new entity really anywhere around the globe, not only would that entity appear in our technology platform, where you could see its name and where it's formed, the entity type and the formation date, but the actual formation document, we call that the evidence of the filing would then automatically be associated with that company in our platform as well.

And then beyond that, our compliance calendar, which we'll look to highlight in the demo that we do towards the end of our webinar, would also then automatically, based on knowledge and rules, calendar when the next set of annual filings are coming due for that particular subsidiary. And just to take it one step further, if you were to engage CSC to prepare and file those annual compliance obligations, the calendar would be automatically updated so you can see where it is in the process of being completed and eventually see it in a completed status. And then that filing document, the evidence so to speak of the annual report, that would also then automatically be linked in real time to the entity within the technology as well. So there's this really powerful marriage of the service and the technology coming together in really transformative ways that our clients are able to reap the benefits of the way that we're just structured in terms of service and technology being so tightly coupled.

Also I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on that second to last bullet, which is the security and availability. And so we go through tremendous effort and annual assessments to ensure that our client's information remains secure and protected. So there's an attestation that we go through, called a SOC 2 Type 2 assessment. And we can provide quite a bit of information on things like encryption and firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, and really the lengths that we go to ensure that our client's information again remains secure and private.

And then availability is equally critical, right? If the website is unavailable, or if it's available but it's crawling, right, so the applications not only need to be available but they need to be performant and responsive, and so we really pride ourselves on making sure that our technology is agile, flexible, modern, and keeping up with our clients, which it certainly does. And so, again, these are a few of the factors where we sort of look at ourselves and say this is really kind of where our value is versus some of again the other competitors within the compliance space.

Now something that we alluded to before and I'll just kind of use some of this animation to bring it more into focus, but we understand that managing companies or managing compliance is not a static exercise, but it's a very fluid and evolving situation. So whether you are at the beginning of the life cycle where you're forming an entity, which brings certain compliance obligations, or maybe you're in more of that maintenance mode where you're dealing with service of process, you're dealing with annual compliance obligations, dealing with licenses perhaps that need to be renewed on a regular cadence, or kind of maybe you're in that expansion mode where you're qualifying in new jurisdictions, maybe you're doing a major acquisition, and so again as these things occur, which they of course naturally do within your organization, again the value here is that CSC understands the phases of the life cycle and offers compliance services across the board.

And then, of course, sort of at the end of that life cycle is what we're calling dissolve, but that's when you're looking to kind of wind up a business and take the appropriate steps, whether you're merging something out of existence or maybe you're selling off a series of assets. But that's also a critical component. And that's even something that organizations will do every so often in terms of what is often referred to as an entity rationalization, where sometimes you take a step back and say, "Wait a minute, why is it we have X number of entities, and what function are these all serving? They had a purpose initially, but now that it's been a number of years, maybe we need to go back and evaluate that."

There's sort of an inherent cost that comes with managing and maintaining an entity. And so, again, CSC does offer compliance services throughout this particular life cycle.

So now I'm going to turn things back over to Paul. Actually no, I'm going to keep this one. Sorry. We're going to talk about some of our related services. So I'll tee this up a little bit.

And so one of the things that you'll see as a part of the abbreviated demo that we'll do at the end of the webinar is a platform that we call CSCNavigator. And critically, this is the platform that brings our compliance services into focus, and it's the lens through which our clients can interact with the information that we're maintaining on their behalf, or in more of an expanded fashion, they can work directly in those technology platforms as well to update information. And so when my colleague Paul starts talking in more detail about our service of process offerings, this will really, I think, come into focus where we provide different levels of technology based on the needs of the individual organization and the individual user.

So some of the things that we'll talk about that, again, come together in Navigator would be service of process management, our annual report preparation and filing service. On the top right, you're seeing Entity Management, which is near and dear to my heart. This is where our clients can go beyond tracking basic vitals for companies and start managing directors/officers and structure charts and minute books. We also, you'll see on the bottom of the slide, have services around business licenses, from outsourcing to technology. We offer a range of corporate secretarial services, that we'll talk more about, called Global Subsidiary Management. That's certainly a focal point of our business certainly post-acquisition of Intertrust. And then CSC Matter Management becomes an extension of our service of process capabilities that Paul will discuss.

Paul: Thank you, David. So as we have mentioned a few times, one of the core obligations for a registered agent is managing the intake of service of process for the entities that they're named as agent for. What we see here on this slide in the purple text is kind of the textbook definition. And really under that definition, service of process relates to that initial notification of a new lawsuit to the parties.

When we talk about service of process in the context of a registered agent, we have to broaden that definition slightly to also incorporate things like wage garnishments, subpoenas, bankruptcy notices, and some of the other items you see there, so other things that kind of move through the court system that a registered agent might be served with.

When we think of what most organizations are kind of most concerned with relative to how service of process is handled, it comes down to a couple of common challenges. So the first is the ability to be available to receive that service of process and then make sure that the agent routes it appropriately within the organization. For most commercial registered agents, and CSC certainly falls into this category, that means delivering documents electronically. It means delivering documents the same day as they are received by the agent so that our customers have the maximum amount of time to respond to lawsuits and other types of service of process, all of which have some sort of ticking clock associated with them.

And then, as David had mentioned in previous slides, we have to do that while making sure that we're maintaining data security. So that means whether the data is in transit in the form of notifications to our customers, or whether it's housed in any of our applications, we want to make sure not only is it secured from a technology standpoint, but also access controlled, meaning making sure that only the people within your organization have access to the information related to service of process documents. And that would be based on those that have been designated by the decision-makers in your organization. So again, having those access controls and overall data security behaviors is something that you should expect of a registered agent relative to service of process.

There are a host of other challenges that service of process can also unpack, but these are the ones we see most often.

One of the things that we have really focused on over the years is making sure that we have an appropriate service of process solution for every customer, and a one-size-fits-all approach just simply doesn't make sense there. There's a big difference between organizations that maybe receive 1 to 10 pieces of service of process a year versus those that are receiving literally hundreds every day and everywhere in between there. So what CSC has gone to market with is a tiered offering, and we try to make sure we're matching customers to the solution that's most appropriate to them.

On the left side of this slide, you see our SOP Manager solution. This is included with our registered agent service and is targeting those customers with lower volumes, lower complexity around the routing and delivery of service of process. The key focus on this application and this solution is to make sure it has a high ease of use, something that is easily adoptable by an organization so you don't really need extensive training to use it. Usually we can kind of just put a user in there, and we built it to be intuitive enough where they can kind of see where they should go to retrieve things. And that's really the focus there is that ease of use and then just making sure that the kind of core actions that you need to do, when you get new service of process, can be done right from the application.

As we move across this slide to the right, into our SOP Pro solution, this is a more robust solution. It has more features. It has greater support for customers who want to manage their workflow around service of process within the application. So where SOP Manager mostly anticipates that people will grab their documents and pull them out of the application to work on them, SOP Pro is definitely geared more around that being a workspace where collaboration may occur, and that may be sort of the final resting place, that might not be the right phrase, but the final landing place for those documents.

And then, as we move further across and get into Enterprise Legal Management, this is really a full-featured application meant to support the entire life cycle of legal matters, whether it's litigation or some other type of matter. So it allows you to not only receive documents from CSC, but also contribute your own documents. It also allows you to collaborate with individuals inside and outside of your organization. So whether that's outside counsel or a member of a business team within your organization, you can do some of that collaboration right within the tool. The tool includes robust reporting and searching tools.

And for both the SOP Pro platform and the Enterprise Legal Management platform, we also have strong integration capabilities. So if you need to send some of your documents out of the application to other teams that maybe use other tools within your business or other vendors who may be managing a portion of that. So, for example, if you've got someone who manages wage garnishments on behalf of your organization, we can send those documents through an integration to those other vendors while letting you maintain the documents that you plan to manage in-house within the platform. So again, we're really trying to make sure that we can kind of meet customers where they are relative to their needs for service of process.

And with that, I'm going to kick things back over to David, who's going to talk about our annual report services.

David: Thank you, Paul. And so at some point along the way I probably referred to our registered agent business as our calling card, maybe bread and butter, but it's what CSC is perhaps best known for. It's been a core service for over a century. Having said that, I think it's probably fair to say that our second most popular service, in terms of the number of organizations that avail themselves of it, would be our Annual Report Preparation and Filing Service.

So first let's talk about what are annual reports and what are some of the challenges. And so when we talk about an annual report, we're talking about an annual compliance filing, typically annual compliance filing that is due at a secretary state level or equivalent. And you'll see here on the slide, that depending on the jurisdiction where the filing is due, it may go by a few different names. So, for example, in California the term "statement of information" is typically used. You'll see things like franchise tax report. But fundamentally, again, these are obligations due at a secretary of state or equivalent. And the criticality, of course, is that failure to submit these filings in a timely and accurate fashion can lead to a lapse in your compliance, and there's all sorts of negative repercussions from that.

So when we talk about challenges of organizations trying to manage this obligation, number one, what's due when and where, right, staying on top of the due dates. Some states are fairly predictable, right? So in Delaware, Delaware makes it fairly simple where the LLCs are due at a certain time of year, corps are do at a different time of year. But then in other jurisdictions, it can be a little bit more complicated. It could be a situation where your fiscal year end plays a part of the calculation. Maybe there are jurisdictions, like Colorado comes to mind, where it's often referred to as an anniversary filing. So based on the date where you either formed or qualified in that state, it's going to dictate when the annual report is due. And I think actually in the case of Colorado, depending on the year the entity is formed, the logic actually varies. So older companies are due at a different time than entities formed more recently.

So it can be really complicated really quickly, especially if you have a large footprint of entity registrations across various states. And so that can be a challenge. While there is some uniformity in terms of the information that needs to be provided to the states, of course it's not all consistent. So there's nuance that has to be accounted for.

And then one of the questions is where are you going to track all this information. Where do we go to understand authoritatively who our active list of signers are, and where do we track things like the principal place of business and the EIN and the business purpose? And in some cases, there might be some capital information that becomes relevant to the filing. And so, again, a lot of the challenges sometimes just stem from not even being quite sure where to go to gather the requisite information in a timely fashion.

And then, as the last bullet point mentions, again failure to comply can be significant. Beyond just sort of lapsing in compliance where you're dealing with fines and penalties to reinstate or come back into a good standing, eventually if something is out of compliance for long enough, you could find yourself revoked. And really the worst-case scenario is that you really no longer cease to be an entity, effectively losing the protections that the entity was created for in the first place. And so that is the ultimate worst-case scenario.

Now what is the service that CSC offers for this particular challenge? And again we call this our Annual Report Preparation and Filing Service. And there's really kind of three pieces, so to speak, of this service.

The first is what we're calling pre-filing services. And so when organizations enroll for this ongoing service, we do an audit to understand what is the actual current standing of all your entities in all the jurisdictions where they're doing business. Is everything in good standing, which would be ideal, or are there some entities where they're in some sort of a negative status and there needs to be some remediation performed just to get them back into good standing?

At the core of the service is really what we're calling filing services, where CSC takes on the actual work of preparing and filing the annual reports on your behalf. Now, as registered agent, some of the information required in these reports is something that we have natively, so to speak, within our technology platform called CSCNavigator. So we'll know the names of those companies, where they're formed and qualified, dates of authorization, charter IDs. Our compliance calendar, which I promise to show in the demo, is going to automate visibility in terms of when the annual reports are actually coming due.

So we've got a lot of this sort of as almost like a great head start. That said, there definitely is information that we need beyond what we're capturing as a registered agent, so things like the signers, the EIN, business purpose, etc. So either clients would provide us with that data in a secure fashion, or if clients are using our CSC Entity Management solution, which is the next service that I'll talk about, they could just capture that information in real time within CSC Entity Management, which then your annual report CSC specialist could in turn just leverage that data in real time to make sure that they're providing the most accurate and updated information for those filings.

And then in terms of post-filing services, this really sort of hearkens back to the integration that I talked about before between service and technology. And so, fundamentally, when we do the filing, we're going to update the calendar so that you can see that the filing has been completed. We're going to take what we call the evidence of the filing, the receipt, if you will, that is proof that the filing was submitted and that's going to be linked automatically to the underlying entity the filing was placed on behalf of. And so that's all just sort of part and parcel to the way we deliver that service and how we give you that visibility and transparency through the CSCNavigator technology platform.

So now I'm not supposed to have favorites, but I do, and it's CSC Entity Management. This is really a focal point for me at CSC in terms of driving the roadmap in terms of the new features that we add to this technology platform.

But before I get ahead of myself, let's make sure we're all on the same page when we talk about entity management because it can be different things to different people. Sometimes when people talk about entity management, they're just talking about the overarching discipline of keeping companies in compliance. In some cases when people say "entity management," they're really talking about the need for services to keep entities in good standing.

But in this case, we're talking more specifically or narrowly about entity management software. So this is off-the-shelf, purpose-built software that helps organizations manage information, documents, compliance events, structure charts around their companies. And so while this is a space that CSC has been in actually for over two decades in terms of offering a software solution, interestingly this is still really an emerging space that's becoming really, really hot and attractive for organizations to get into for the first time in terms of adopting or implementing entity management software.

There was a survey in 2021, so a couple years ago now, where CLOC, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, teamed up with the ACC, Association of Corporate Counsel organization, and they did a global survey and they connected with over 200 organizations across I think there were 20 different countries. And one of the questions was, "What are you using for entity management?" And really only half of the respondents cited the fact that they were using a technology solution. And so it's really kind of eye-opening that this is still an emerging space.

And so many organizations, don't be ashamed if you're one of them, are using spreadsheets and share drives and doing their best to sort of keep their arms around their entity information. But fundamentally there's problems with that approach. Number one, there's this lack of a central repository or source of truth that the definitive record for where you would go to find that information. There's no automation. Reporting is non-existent, right? You're having to sort of cobble things together.

One of the other challenges that we see is that the legal department, which is most often tasked with this responsibility, becomes a bit of a bottleneck, where other parts of the organization have to constantly go to the legal department to ask questions like who are the signers and what's the EIN and is this entity active or in this particular jurisdiction. Whereas proper modern entity management software can really create a culture of self-service, where again you can have administrative users that are taking ownership of the information in the platform, but they can securely and intelligently permission individuals into view information so that whether it's tax or treasury or finance or any other parts of the business can get real-time visibility, and everyone is sort of singing from the same song book or working from the same playbook, if you will.

And so the CSC Entity Management platform specifically, it certainly checks all of the boxes in terms of things you'd expect to see in terms of tracking directors and officers, building structure charts, being able to create online document repositories. But it really goes well beyond that. Again, fundamentally the power is the fact that it's integrated with our compliance services, so information flowing automatically into the tool.

Not only do we have what I'll call a general framework for integrations, and Paul talked about this a little bit with service of process, but where again people and clients can take information in CSC Entity Management and feed it into multiple downstream systems, but we've also made a number of strides in recent years with what I would describe as pre-built integrations. And there's two that I'll talk to quickly.

The first being our electronic signature workflow. So we have a pre-built partnership integration with DocuSign. So for organizations that are using DocuSign, you can work within CSC Entity Management and very seamlessly push documents out for electronic signature. When those documents are fully executed, they're flowing back into the platform, where they can be tied to minute books or document folders in the technology.

More recently, towards the outset of this year, we launched an integration with the Workday Human Capital Management HR system. And so the HR system is typically the source of truth for employees, and a subset of those employees are individuals that are being tracked within our officer and director module. And so if a change happens to someone, it's often the HR system, in this case Workday, that's the first system to really know about that. So whether it's a name change, a location change, a title change, these types of things again can generate alerts and in-app notifications to our users to let them know that there may be a change that occurred in Workday that would necessitate an update to your officer and director information, which is critical because these officers and directors, and I say officer and directors, it could be members, managers, partners, powers of attorney, it's any sort of appointments that you want to be able to track, these are included in annual reports, not just here in the U.S. but globally as well. And so organizations have felt the pain of not having accurate information around directors and officers. And so this really helps add that that real-time visibility to those types of changes within an organization.

So the last service that I'll talk about, before I turn things back over to Paul, is what we call Global Subsidiary Management, and this is a term that we use to describe a suite of global corporate secretarial services. And so the slide that you see here talks about some of the challenges that organizations face in terms of operating globally.

And I think one of the biggest challenges is just the sheer complexity of the regulatory landscape. It's not like there's U.S. compliance and international compliance. As one of my colleagues likes to say, there's compliance in Brazil and compliance in Singapore and compliance in China, and it's not all the same. So each country has its own nuance. So what we bring to the table is centralization and a proactive approach. And so a lot of organizations that partner with us are coming from really a fragmented approach, where they're using a disconnected network of law firms or service companies. They might have some boots on the ground in certain countries. But the challenge is that they lack a source of truth for their information. A lot of times we'll have conversations where we look to understand their spend, and they candidly can't provide an answer because they're dealing with multiple currencies. There's challenges with time zones.

There's just sort of a litany of challenges with managing a global portfolio of entities. And so, again, what we bring to the table through our Global Subsidiary Management offering is a single point of contact within one of our hubs, which could be in the Americas, in AMEA, or in APAC, a proactive approach where we understand what to do in what country where. So again, certain countries you might have quarterly board meetings. In another country, you need to file an annual financial statement with your annual return. And so all of those needed services are provided as a part of what we call annual compliance support. And then, again, you've got that one provider to work with. We provide the overwhelming majority of these services in fixed, flat annual fees, so there's budget certainty and understanding.

And then also I can't resist the final solution on the bottom there, which is the fact that CSC Entity Management, which we just talked about, becomes this core underlying foundational technology where all this information becomes available. So again, if you had us do let's say a global director change, not only are we adding the new person and archiving the old person within CSC Entity Management, we're drafting the documents in dual languages so there's a in-country language and then a working English translation. And we're tying those documents to those entities within CSC Entity Management in an automated fashion, just a part of that service.

So what are the specific GSM or Global Subsidiary Management services that we offer? We've got them sort of divided into three categories. Again, I mentioned this in passing, but annual compliance support, the idea that there are known things that we can prescribe that do vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So we're talking about preparation of annual general meetings, annual returns or equivalents, the updating of UBO registers or ultimate beneficial owner registers.

And then, if you look at transaction services, again there's things that we sort of can't predict. You might have the need to form new entities or dissolve companies or have a director change, as I noted before. You might have needs for domiciliation or a local director. And so, as needed, these are services that we absolutely can provide.

And then specialized services, which in large part come from our acquisition of the Intertrust Group, deal with things like accounting, tax, and payroll, going beyond just what some folks will call corporate services or what we call corporate secretarial in sort of a much deeper, broader service offering around global compliance.

And so I could go on and on, but I want to make sure that we've got time to talk about business licensing and have time for a demonstration of Navigator as well. So, Paul, I'll bring you back into the conversation to talk about licenses.

Paul: Thank you again, David. So David, when discussing the annual report prep and file services that CSC offers, mentioned that one of the challenges there is managing the complicated compliance requirements across the 50 jurisdictions. And so business license is a very similar problem space, except that that space is exponentially larger. So instead of dealing with 50 jurisdictions, when we consider state, county, and city level license requirements, you're dealing with closer to 160,000 jurisdictions. So obviously that's a much more challenging space to be expert in. It's a much more challenging space to keep track of. And it's a challenge for almost every organization. And even beyond just those jurisdictions, there can also be additional nuance and complexity for industry-specific licenses.

So as you just continue to layer and layer that complexity, again this is just a really challenging space for a lot of organizations. And what they're up against are trying to avoid penalties when they file licenses or renew licenses after their expiration date, potential lawsuits, and ultimately something that is a real consequence of not having the proper licensing is actual business closure. So that can be especially damaging. I mean, that can be damaging on any day to any business, but that can be especially damaging if this is something that happens in the context of opening a new location. There can often be a lot of activity around that and trying to bring all that together and getting all the way to the finish line and finding that you can't open the doors because you're missing a license.

Those kind of things happen all the time to businesses. And so those are the very real world concerns that we are trying to address through our services around business licenses. And again, they're the concerns that our customers have stated over and over again.

One of the most critical and difficult things around managing all of those complex requirements, it's not only identifying what they are, but making sure you have up-to-date, accurate information needed to support the filing of those licenses and having that at your fingertips when you need it. The reason that things get filed late or they get misfiled or not filed at all, it's often because the information needed to file the license just can't be acquired rapidly enough. So when we talk about solutions in this space, and I'll talk a little bit more about those on the next slide, we're really talking about answering those specific problems, that knowledge deficit that exists, the complexity, the timing, and ultimately all of the entity vitals and detail you need to be able to file things appropriately.

So as CSC looks to help our customers manage those challenges, we basically have three different offerings, some of which can be used in combination and some that operate more as a standalone. But the first one is just a research service, so again really trying to address that knowledge gap. So CSC, whether you're working to maintain the compliance of an existing location or open a new location, helping identify all the necessary licenses that need to be filed for that location to be in compliance, so basically to keep the doors open or to open the doors. So CSC can provide those research services, and again that can be done for both existing and new locations.

As I kind of describe these problems, this brings up a lot of anxiety for people who have been involved in this on any level. And one of the ways we can help with that anxiety is to make it our anxiety and not yours. So we offer a full-service outsourcing solution. So you'll still have access and visibility to a full portfolio of your licenses within our CSCNavigator platform, but you'll basically turn over the management of those licenses and making sure things are filed timely and orderly to CSC.

For customers who want a more hands-on approach, they feel like they've got a handle on how to do this well, they just need a tool for managing the portfolio and the requirements, we also offer a software solution, which is what we see at the bottom of the slide here, with our CSC License Pro solution. So again, that's software that helps you manage these compliance requirements. It helps you stay up to date on the requirements and gives you a place to put all that critical information you need to support the filing.

So again, the research service can really be combined with either the outsourcing or the software solution. But again, this is another case where we're really trying to meet customers where they are and trying to make sure we have a solution appropriate to their specific challenges in this space. And again, challenges in this space seem to be where almost everyone is living. It's a very challenging space just because it's just a huge amount of information that you've got to keep track of both in terms of your own information and the information about what the requirements are in any given location for any given type of business.