Entity Management Best Practices for Highly Regulated Industries

As business ecosystems become increasingly complex, organizations must implement established entity management best practices to maintain visibility and compliance. 

Developing an effective entity management strategy is particularly important for organizations operating in tightly regulated sectors like finance, healthcare, automotive manufacturing, or alcohol production and distribution.

For any organization, ineffective entity management can lead to a lack of visibility, slowed decision-making, and increased operating costs. For companies in highly regulated verticals, poor entity management practices can also mean fines and hefty financial penalties that threaten business continuity.

To help you navigate the ever-increasing complexities of entity management, let’s examine five entity management best practices for highly regulated industries. 

Why the Stakes Are Higher for Heavily Regulated Verticals

If you operate in a highly regulated sector, the repercussions of ineffective entity management can be severe and far-reaching. At the surface level, poor entity management processes can lead to mistakes, wasted time, and unnecessary costs.

When you add the possibility of fines and other penalties to the mix, the stakes become much higher. Ineffective entity management significantly increases your risk of drawing the ire of regulatory authorities.

Failing to adhere to established best practices also makes your organization more vulnerable to cybercriminals.

Whether you operate in healthcare, finance, or another closely governed sector, your business amasses a large volume of consumer data. This information is an attractive target for hackers and bad actors that mean you and your business harm.

When you lose sight of your entities, it’s nearly impossible to maintain adequate operational security. Fortunately, you can avoid fines, keep costs in check, maximize productivity, and optimize your security stance by adhering to several entity management best practices. 

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5 Entity Management Best Practices You Need to Embrace

Here are five entity management best practices you should integrate into your business strategy without delay.

1. Centralize Record-Keeping, Regulatory Filings, and Compliance

When your record-keeping system relies on disparate systems and processes, you set yourself up for a regulatory nightmare.

Under the best circumstances, team members must waste valuable time hunting for documents when updating records or preparing regulatory filings. When things go awry, you’ll face missed deadlines, fines, and compliance violations that threaten business continuity.

Consolidating your mission-critical data into a centralized, secure location promotes accessibility and useability. Whether your team needs to file a regulatory document or generate a report, they’ll be able to locate the information they need easily. 

Unifying your entity data into a cloud-based solution will also promote better productivity and efficiency in the day-to-day routine. Your shareholders, directors, and employees will have the information and tools they need to execute their respective responsibilities accurately and effectively.

2. Create a Governance Framework for Your Subsidiaries

Organizations that manage hundreds of subsidiaries can’t rely on manual processes to access entity data. Instead, they need a detailed framework for governing each subsidiary. Instituting such a framework ensures that any authorized user can access vital entity data, regardless of where they’re located. 

By following the lead of successful global brands and creating your own subsidiary governance framework, you can promote information accessibility and business efficiency. Adopting a scalable, modular framework will also make it easier to add or remove entities as your business evolves.

That said, you need support from the C-suite before you can build your framework. Getting stakeholders on board will ensure that you have the resources and backing necessary to create a functional governance framework. 

3. Empower Your Directors

From a directorial perspective, managing entities that span jurisdictional thresholds can become extremely difficult and complex. This is especially true if each entity operates under a different regulatory framework.

To empower your directors to overcome these complexities, you must guarantee that they have the freedom to exercise independent judgment and apply their expertise to resolve any conflicts that may arise.

While there are many ways to empower your directors, two of the most pragmatic approaches involve upgrading your technology stack and providing your decision-makers with a clear set of operational guidelines.

The guidelines will help your directors understand what decisions they can make unilaterally and what requires secondary approval. Providing them with robust entity management tools gives them the necessary insights to communicate, share information, and fulfill their responsibilities.

4. Support Your Corporate Secretary

In the modern business ecosystem, the corporate secretary does much more than just perform recordkeeping services. Today, the corporate secretary fulfills a variety of functions, including:

• Creating meeting agendas
• Documenting important events
• Maintaining governance
• Reporting and following up with stakeholders
• Enabling board development
• Facilitating stakeholder communication

While a skilled corporate secretary will certainly be up to the challenge of handling all of these responsibilities, you need to put them in a position to succeed with the right tools and technologies. 

5. Make Technology the Foundation for Compliance

Adopting modern entity management software can be a catalyst for remedying all of your entity governance and compliance woes. Before settling on a solution, however, make it a point to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment and identify which entity management challenges your business is facing.

Ideally, you want a scalable, cloud-based solution that you can modify to align with your shifting business needs. The platform should also be capable of replacing several of your disparate solutions and consolidating your entity data into one convenient place.

Make a list of nice-to-haves and must-haves, and reference this checklist to find the platform that aligns with your company’s objectives, needs, and growth goals. Your list will serve as a guide to help you quickly sort through prospective solutions and narrow your focus to a few leading platforms.

Reimagine Your Approach to Entity Management with Athennian  

If you want to gain an edge over your competitors, elevate your compliance strategy, and keep pace with rapidly evolving regulatory requirements, you need an entity management solution that can keep up.

As a best-of-breed, cloud-based entity management platform, Athennian represents the ideal match for highly regulated organizations.

To learn more about our robust, scalable platform and everything it can do for your organization, request a demo with an entity management expert today.