5 Technologies Every Company Secretary Needs for Highly Regulated Industries

Striving to ensure excellence in regulatory governance and compliance, company secretaries utilize multiple digital tools in their day-to-day work. The abundance of technologies and applications offers the company secretariat multiple choices designed to address a particular need or a process.

Among the plethora of software options, most company secretaries have a core toolset necessary to fulfill their primary duties within an organization. Below, we discuss in more detail the top 5 technologies every company secretary needs for highly regulated industries and how these technologies are integrated on the Athennian platform. 

1. Entity Management Software for Governance and Compliance

The importance of entity management software in assisting company secretaries working in highly regulated industries cannot be overestimated. In addressing regulatory compliance, company secretaries need a robust system in place to oversee all legal entities in the corporate structure and ensure that all of them are in good standing. In addition, when the number of legal entities grows exponentially, company secretaries need effective technology to manage multiple datasets and provide for timely filings through automation.

In the context of highly regulated industries, having effective entity management software becomes even more instrumental for staying at the top of compliance in the ever-changing regulatory landscape. Company secretaries need entity management technology to have all information about their entities at their fingertips and leverage automated workflows and reminders to keep up with the times and ensure regulatory compliance.

2. Board Management Tools for Board Support

Acting as a liaison between the board and the shareholders on the one side and the board and directors on the other side, company secretaries need technology to arrange for board meetings and prepare board packages. By using digital tools based on automation, company secretaries can streamline reporting and presentations and provide the board with accurate information to ensure a robust framework for the board's decision-making process.

When company secretaries prepare for a board meeting of a regulated company, they face additional challenges in relation to compliance. Company secretaries need technology to stay informed on regulatory changes and update the board on the new enactments, provide for full disclosure and transparency in their reporting and ensure that the board package is audit-ready at all times. 

In addition to facilitating the board package preparation, the technology should provide a secure platform for board communication, meeting scheduling, and document sharing while ensuring the safety and security of sensitive information.

3. Document Creation and Communication

Company secretaries process and generate massive volumes of documentation, which takes different tools and applications. 

Traditionally, many company secretaries rely on Microsoft Office Suite for document creation, data analysis, presentations and communications. However, keeping sensitive data in Excel spreadsheets or Word documents and exchanging them by email is not considered a best practice, especially in regulated industries. Meanwhile, it is common knowledge that spreadsheets introduce risks and are prone to mistakes, making reporting unreliable and potentially leading to bad decisions.

Instead, company secretaries using specialized platforms, like Athennian, achieve higher productivity and provide for the accuracy and relevancy of information by using document automation tools and pre-populated templates. By keeping document generation and collaborative editing within the same platform certified to the industry standards, regulated businesses adhere to data safety requirements and ensure compliance.

4. Workflow Software for Project Management

Having to collaborate with multiple teams within an organization, the company secretariat needs project management software to manage tasks, deadlines and workflows. Sometimes, diversified businesses have two or more workflow tools used by different teams for their projects. 

Meanwhile, utilizing several workflow tools simultaneously may bring risks, cause teams to lose control of important tasks or have contradictory data on project fulfillment. Some organizations overcome this situation by synchronizing compatible tools to make sure that all teams are on the same page. However, many large and complex organizations find it beneficial to combine all their workflows on one platform to leverage a central corporate database to avoid data mismatch and improve collaboration and cooperation across the board.

5. Cloud Capabilities for Data Storage and File Sharing

Following the major shift to the cloud, many organizations use services like Google Drive for document sharing and storage. Indeed, moving files from local servers and laptops to the cloud excludes the necessity to exchange them by email and allows for collaborative editing, viewing and accessing remotely.

Still, however useful these might be, storage and sharing of sensitive data pertaining to regulated businesses on the public cloud lead to vulnerabilities and risks of accidental disclosure. In addition,  while sharing access to files on cloud storage may look like a normal way of doing business, such practice increases third-party risks, existing in multiple forms, which can lead to security breaches, phishing attacks and malware. 

In a corporate setting, company secretaries work with the most important information, necessary for board decisions and shareholder engagements. By the nature of their involvement, company secretaries need robust solutions for cloud storage, providing finer controls over how the users interact with data, preferably based on private servers, 

Learn More with Athennian

Built as an all-in-one entity management platform, Athennian provides company secretaries with safe and secure cloud storage for all corporate records, creating a single source of truth of organizations' data and leveraging permissions and access rights. 

Company secretaries in highly regulated businesses working with Athennian draw on its capabilities for entity management, board management, document generation, and project management, as well as for cloud storage of corporate data. For more information about how Athennian can serve as a universal toolset for company secretaries in highly regulated industries, please don't hesitate to contact us for a  free consultation and demo.

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