A Unified Approach to Global Subsidiary Management: A Deep Dive into CSC’s GSM Services and Technology

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Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "A Unified Approach to Global Subsidiary Management, A Deep Dive into CSC's GSM Services and Technology." My name is Annie Triboletti. I will be your moderator kicking things off today.

So joining us today are John LaPalomento and Andrea Jonaitis. Andrea is one of our expert sales engineers, and John is a director of Global Subsidiary Management. So with that, I would like to welcome in Andrea and John.

John: Thanks a lot, Annie.

Andrea: Hey, everyone.

John: Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us wherever you are in the world. We're happy to share some time today. I'm John. That's Andrea. We're really happy to answer your questions and give you some insight regarding our suite of Global Subsidiary Management corporate secretarial services and, of course, our amazing award-winning technology, GSM Entity Management. So let's get started.

We're going to be taking a look today at quite a few things. Obviously, we're going to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit about CSC, who we are, and what we do. We're going to briefly touch on that Barometer Report that Annie mentioned. I encourage you to download it, take a look at it. There's some really nice information in there. We'll talk about why CSC might make sense as your trusted provider for a centralized approach to corporate secretarial governance and automated capture of data and documentation in our award-winning technology.

We're going to talk a lot about our CSC solutions today. So if you've come here interested in understanding what CSC can do for you, you're in the right place. And of course, Andrea, the expert that she is regarding our technology, is going to run us through a quick technology demonstration.

Everything today is fairly high level. So please take advantage of the teams we have here at CSC. Schedule time with your customer solutions manager. Let's dive deeper. Let's look at your specific organization's needs when it comes to managing corporate secretarial obligations, when it comes to our technology and how that might fit.

So let's go ahead and dive in here a little bit about CSC. I would venture a guess that most of you on today's webinar know who CSC is and what we do. But a lot of organizations know CSC as a U.S. service provider, and it makes perfect sense. We've been a U.S. service provider for 127 years. We're older than some of the states. We have great relationships with all the secretary of state offices. It makes sense that you know us as a U.S. service provider. But CSC has been working internationally for over 70 years. And we've really been defining and refining this suite of global subsidiary management services for over the past decade or so. So when it comes to managing portfolios of businesses around the world, that's what we do.

My area of expertise we call Global Subsidiary Management, and it's our centralized approach to corporate secretarial governance. It's one of the big topics for today. We offer these services in over 145 countries around the world.

So please, for those of you who are thinking CSC is the U.S. service provider starting to work internationally, we have a deep root system globally, offices around the world, thousands of employees around the world. We're trusted by more than 90% of the Fortune 500, and we work with more than 90% of the 100 Best Global Brands.

Our reach globally made some significant changes a little over three years ago with our $3 billion acquisition of the Intertrust Group, which bolstered existing services, like our Global Subsidiary Management. It was an existing CSC service that then had even greater capabilities, and also added some I'll say adjacent services, like tax and accounting and payroll, in a number of jurisdictions around the world as well.

So we're certainly always happy to explore who we are. But let's talk a little bit today about what we're going to do for you. Andrea, do you want to talk a little bit about our purpose, promise, and values?

Andrea: Sure, I definitely can. I mean, CSC, we want to be an enduring profitable company. We want to give you actionable data through our various technologies, which are integrated and automated with the CSC services that we offer for you. Really, we take a lot of pride in who we are as an organization and the services that we offer. And we are really uniquely positioned in that we are not just a service company and not just a technology company, but really a molding of both of those, which are guided by the core values and principles that you see here.

So I won't belabor them, but we strive to be purposeful. We strive to have tenacity and have great values. And really, when we take a look at the needs of our customers, we want to form formulate the perfect solution to come up with something that's a good fit for you. And we're not here to just try to push services or technologies that aren't meaningful or beneficial to you. We really want to take a look at the perfect solution which is going to make your life easier, better, faster, free you up for other things that you need to do to run your business. And so we take a very purposeful and considerate approach to the solutions that we bring to the table.

John: Yeah, I think that couldn't have been stated any better. Purposeful, everything we do is based on your needs. And let me make this very fair and clear. Andrea and I are not on the Sales team here at CSC. Not that there's anything wrong with salespeople. We're not here to try to sell you services that you don't need. We're always here to understand our clients' needs and formulate the right solution.

The technology that we're going to see today and the service that I'll discuss are highly malleable. We have clients who are managing two entities in one country outside of the U.S. who could use some help, and we have organizations who are managing thousands of entities in over 100 countries around the world and leverage our technology to make life easy and our services in a way that's very different from each other. So we're here to formulate a solution that really makes sense with your specific needs as an organization.

We've already touched on the "General Counsel Barometer Report." Basically, this is information that's been sourced from over 350 general counsel and legal compliance officers around the world. This is not specifically an American purview, which is really important to note. This is going to give you insight that you may have not considered yet to this date. And I think it's really valuable. So please download it. Take a look when you have a chance. It might beget some questions that you haven't considered, and it might open up some doors where CSC can allow you to work more efficiently and effectively around the world. So take advantage of that.

Let's point out a few key findings of the Barometer Report that I think you might find interesting. Just as a highlight here, 98% of our respondents said that their organizations plan to expand. [inaudible 00:07:34] is growing as an organization. That's up from the previous year very significantly. Of those respondents, almost half of them plan to expand internationally. Now in many cases that's expanding internationally for the first time.

A big part of what I do is education. I was on a call earlier this morning with somebody who for the first time is crossing borders and really had no understanding of how to approach that. So we're here to assist. I'm always here to jump on a call and help bring into focus what your needs will look like in different jurisdictions around the world. We're not a law firm. We can't give you tax strategy, but we can certainly tell you what your options are. So it's certainly come our way.

When it comes to I'll say considerations and risk, the challenging regulatory landscape ranked as the top consideration to legal operations in terms of risk. And that's understood. It's a changing world. There are different regulations, ultimate beneficial ownership regulations, anti-money laundering regulations. We're here to help bring that into focus for you and make your life a little bit more consistent when it comes to how you're working outside of the U.S.

Let's talk a little bit about why CSC might be a perfect fit for your needs. So we're going to start by talking about our service, Global Subsidiary Management. And just as a framework for today, we're going to kind of split our conversation first with the service aspect of fulfilling your corporate secretarial duties around the world. Global Subsidiary Management, you'll commonly hear us throw around the acronym GSM. That's a service for facilitating all of your corporate secretarial obligations, including taking on appointments like company secretary appointments, satisfying domiciliation, but most importantly satisfying things like the attention to your annual general meetings and annual account filings. Then we're going to take a look at our corresponding technology, which captures everything and brings transparency and visibility around the world for an unlimited number of users.

So speaking first about our service, Global Subsidiary Management, we're really here to focus on your corporate secretarial duties, both your regularly scheduled obligations, like AGMs and annual account filings, as well as maybe some peripheral needs that you might have specifically in an optional sense, if you need us to satisfy a registered office appointment or a nominee director appointment, as well as the things that happen when they happen, facilitating director changes, forming new companies, dissolving old companies.

Now the beauty of our service is centralization. When I talk about centralization, I talk about centralization really three different ways. It's the centralization of your workflows. So rather than having different law firm partners in different jurisdictions, if you have a portfolio of 15 companies in 15 countries, instead of having 15 law firms with whom you're communicating, with whom you're juggling time zones, with whom you're juggling currencies, where there's a lack of consistency and so on, CSC is going to roll out a consistent and centralized approach, giving you a single point of contact with whom you're on a first-name basis. You have a business friendship there in front of you, and we're here to take on a concierge level of support for your corporate secretarial duties. Taking a proactive approach to your regularly scheduled appointments and needs. Taking a quick approach when you have something extraordinary for us to handle. We're here to make that simple.

So centralization number one is the centralization of your workflows. We manage workflow out of three hubs for the service. We have project managers in Wilmington, Delaware for our American-based clientele and all of the Americas. out of London, England for our European-based clientele, and out of India for our Asian-based clientele. So we're going to support things regionally.

Now we have local offices around the world. If your French team wanted to work with our French office, or your Japanese team wanted to work with our Japanese office, we can facilitate that for sure. However, it's the centralization by way of central project management that truly brings the value and efficiency to what we do. You're reducing your duplicative steps.

The second part of centralization is the centralization and automated capture of your data and documentation by way of the technology that Andrea is going to show you here in a second. These two services really entangle and work as one. Everything that my team drafts for you, we draft in dual languages, and upon filing, it's captured digitally within our technology. That's true for all of the documentation that we produce, but that's also true for all of the data points that are byproducts of our service.

If you have us facilitate a director change, maybe it's one director resigning, but that director had an appointment on 10 entities. Instead of that being 10 projects for you with 10 different firms, we manage that as one project. And when that documentation is completed, it's all loaded into our system. And in this example, we'd be making changes to the officer director management portal or our appointment portal within our technology, which I'm sure Andrea will show you, where we'd be making that director listed as inactive and moved into an archival state with an expiration date, and the newly elected officials loaded into that system with their name and title, perpetuity of term, signing authority, and so on. So you get both the documentation and the data management in an automated fashion.

The third prong of this three-pronged fork of centralization is the centralization of what I'll just define as kind of the logistics of working internationally. You have one accounts receivable team. You have one account management team. You have one contract governing all of this work for you. And most importantly, you have your budget on a silver platter. We're here to offer these services in flat rate costs in several different currencies. If you would rather be billed in pound sterling or be billed in euro or be billed U.S. dollars consistently, we can do that. Or we can also set up different billing accounts, where we bill different entities in different currencies. So we have lots of capabilities there, and you get to work in a centralized, consistent approach with CSC.

Our annual services, I'll pause on this slide one more second to talk quickly about our annual services, which we call Annual Compliance Support. Annual Compliance Support is built in a way where there's variance by jurisdiction and by entity type. It's very different managing a Canadian corporation than an Indian private limited company. But we're going to build a suite of inclusions for each jurisdiction, for each entity that's consistent with the needs and common practices of that entity.

So it's going to be a loose description here, but generally speaking, Annual Compliance Support for one flat rate is going to include the management of your minute books and shareholder registers, always digitally within our technology, but physically in country if we're appointed to do so. The management of your annual general meeting obligations in dual language, drafting the notice and agenda and a pro forma set of minutes for physical meetings, or an annual resolution for those jurisdictions that are commonly satisfied by resolution. And that's going to vary. In the UK, you have no annual meeting obligation. Well, there's no need for that. In Canada or the Netherlands or so many other jurisdictions, you'd almost always meet by written resolution, so we're going to handle it like that. And a jurisdiction like India, you're going to have quarterly board of directors meetings and an annual shareholders meeting. We're going to handle all of that for you, including holding the power of attorney to open the conference bridge and video call from India as is required by regulation. So quite a bit of nuance for these inclusions, but it's logical nuance, if that makes sense.

We're going to include the attention to your annual account filings or any filings due to the business registry. This is where I'll bifurcate tax filings and corporate filings. We're here to handle the corporate side of the house, so your filings due to ASIC in Australia, your filings due to Companies House in the UK, and any business registry at which we're working.

We're here to facilitate ultimate beneficial ownership management and make your life easy there. Where we have regular annual filings, that's a standard inclusion of our Annual Compliance Support. And in some jurisdictions, we include specific appointments. In Singapore, we're going to act as your resident company secretary for no additional cost. While other organizations are charging you extra for those types of things, we're going to understand where that's a need and common for your corporate secretarial provider to act in that capacity.

In an optional fashion, you can have CSC act as your registered office anywhere. Americans, don't misconstrue that for U.S. registered agent. That's not about service of process. That's about principal place of business and minute book management. But it's something that we can handle anywhere we're legally permissible, and we'll be able to give you some guidance where it really makes sense for CSC to take on that appointment no matter what, or where it makes sense for you to maintain that appointment internally if you have the capabilities, as well as things like company secretary appointments, and if necessary even satisfying residency obligations around the world.

There's a lot to this conversation. I encourage more time to speak directly. So reach out to a member of your Client Services team here at CSC to schedule a consultation, and I'll be happy to have that conversation with you.

So why do organizations trust CSC in this regard? I would say first of all just some numbers. About 80% of new Global Subsidiary Management clients are coming to us using a decentralized system now. They're coming to us looking for centralization. Now there's still 20% to 25% who are trying to use a centralized manner now. I would say competitors of ours and maybe not as successful as they were hoping. So they turn the page and come to CSC for a better opportunity. But in either case, everybody who comes to us is looking for centralization.

In fact, if you're on this call and you're thinking that you want your Indian team to work with an Indian firm and your Singapore team to work with a Singaporean firm and your Brazilian team to work with a Brazilian firm, we might not be the perfect fit for you. We really are here to make things easy in terms of overall centralization. Now we have those local offices. So if you want that to be the case, we can make that work. But most organizations are coming to us with at the very least a regional approach or an overall global approach to centralizing corporate secretarial needs.

We're here to deliver best-in-class service. We've been saying it for years. Service is our middle name here at Corporation Service Company, and we're really here to take care of our clients. We're not a law firm offering these ancillary services that are lower budget services for a law firm hoping to maintain your legal work and just doing a good enough job. This is what we do here at CSC, when it comes to maintaining your corporate secretarial obligations and maintaining that data visible for you. So we're here to do a great job of that.

We do have jurisdictional expertise. If you're an American working with our Delaware team, it's not Delawareans who are drafting your annual general meeting in Singapore, right? That's our Singapore team who's doing that. So we're here to lean on our local teams when it comes to expertise and fulfillment, but we're here to locally manage your communication and project management.

Industry-leading solutions and a big part of that is the technology, that Andrea is about to show you, that goes hand in hand with our services. And simplified administration. As I'd mentioned, if you have one team with whom you're going to work for your invoicing, I guarantee you that's going to make your life easier and it goes much further beyond that.

Our delivery model is one that I've already described a few times. You're going to work with your hub centrally, wherever they are, based in Wilmington, based in the UK, based in India, and you're not locked into one. You might have some components of your team who are over the pond in Europe and would be better off working with our British team and vice versa with our Indian team. We're flexible and nimble. So however your organization needs to be managed, we're here to come up with the right solution and the right puzzle pieces to put that together for you.

So that brings us to our Entity Management platform, and I'm so happy to welcome one side. I've been commanding this call the entire time. I'm so happy to bring a much more beautiful voice to the call. Andrea, if you can wow us with our technology.

Andrea: That's very kind of you, John, and thank you for that. So I had started to set the foundation for the way that CSC is going to integrate our technology with our services. This is just a little bit about the CSC Entity Management platform. When we take care of all of those corporate secretarial services that John just highlighted for you, you're going to see that our teams around the world are going to populate the Entity Management tool with data elements, documents, records, and files. And we will keep that up to date for you as part of the service, and you can simply sit back and enjoy that automation.

It also is incredibly feature rich, with a robust selection of features that you could leverage proactively on your own. It is a heavily configurable system. You can create custom data fields. You can upload your own documents in an unlimited fashion. And there are many kind of modular areas that you could leverage, like document storage or document generation, the ability to create custom data fields and manage entity vitals, officer director data, capital and ownership records. You could use the built-in org chart capabilities to build and design graphic or text-based structure charts.

We offer integrations with other technologies, such as Workday Human Capital Management. We're integrated with Docusign for your electronic signature capabilities.

We offer, of course, calendaring and reporting to keep you organized and in compliance with those requirements. Even though our team may be proactively handling those deadlines on your behalf, we give you incredible transparency and visibility into all of those elements.