Rolf Heemskerk, Managing Director of Viewpoint Software for Business, gives his perspectives – published in the Future View supplement included with the May-July 2021 issue of Businesslife
There is always a danger that we reframe much of what we do in business through the prism of digital. As though ‘going digital’ in some way offers a panacea for doing something better.
Automation, for example, has great potential to speed up processes and offer an open-all-hours solution to a range of business client requirements.
Over-automation, though, too often ignores the value of trust generated through relationships between people.
Perhaps the way to judge the worth of going digital is by assessing whether it actually brings better and, in particular, the type of ‘better’ that the user will identify and value.
Entity management is just such an example. As a function of business, it ensures legal entities adhere to the appropriate regulations and best practices whether they are companies, trusts, or partnerships. This, then, begs the question: is one provider much like another; are they all made equal?
In short, no they are not, and careful consideration should be exercised when seeking the right partner with which to work.
For international finance locations, such as Jersey, Guernsey, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and others, entity management has evolved into a highly specialised professional service that underpins many of the other financial and legal services available in international finance centres.
Digitisation has provided a pathway to dedicated niche solutions, such as Viewpoint, to offer service providers, and clients, not only secure relational database systems but also the ability to integrate the previously disparate parts of an organisation, such as compliance, billing and accounting, into a single platform.
Value-added benefits
For clients, a capable digitalisation solution opens the door to a vast array of value-added benefits.
For example, in governance, by utilising business process management – or BPM – our clients have transformed their day-to-day activities and standard operating procedures across all areas of their business, into controlled and pre-risk-assessed standard operating processes that seamlessly guide users through every aspect of every task.
The use of digitalisation also enables once laborious tasks to be done in a fraction of the time. This means that from the completion and submission of a statutory form, to the sending of thousands of reminders to clients, success is a just a few clicks away.
Dynamic solutions, such as the Viewpoint platform, automate processes and thereby significantly reduce human error.
In addition, a state-of-the-art entity management solution offers extensive data validation verification tools to further increase accuracy by reducing the classic ‘garbage in, garbage out’ adage issues that are still apparent in lesser solutions.
With the introduction of BPM and automation, the latter introduced because it has tangible value, it is possible to achieve very high-level degrees of consistency on all aspects of business, both in terms of quality and service delivery timeliness.
Consistency brings fewer errors, reduces risk and, in turn, promotes improved client satisfaction.
The availability of data in a high-quality, relevant solution can make oversight fully attainable and comprehensive.
For example, BPM offers details of the status of every activity, information on the time spent and bottle necks. Additionally, digitalisation allows highly customisable intuitive dashboards to provide instant insights on any aspect of your business, assuming you have a platform offering an integrated solution.
Managing complexity
Managing entity data is being affected by volume and complexity. As global governance and compliance regulations become more stringent and wide-ranging, adherence to the regulations requires providers to continuously maintain more data and documentation than previously.
GDPR, CRS, economic substance and DAC6 are recently introduced mandatory regimes that have an impact on all professional entity management practitioners.
Each has its own specific requirements, increasing the volume and complexity of the documentation and data that the service provider needs to obtain and maintain.
Selecting the right provider is key to this. A tier-one digital solution, such as Viewpoint, is proactively developed to cater for industry requirement changes.
Frequent updates and enhancements to its solution cater for the increased volume of documents and data requirements of its clients.
If a solution provider is behind the curve on changes within its client base, unfortunately it is the client that suffers, not only in not being able to service its clients appropriately, but also in being able to comply with regulations.
Critical to that digital element is the support for compliance professionals in navigation and delivery under the burden of increased reporting.
Despite compliance and regulatory reporting diverging into distinct specialist areas, both rely heavily on digitalisation to perform their activities effectively.
For compliance, there are so many variables to consider it would probably be impossible to work without a digital solution.
The integrated name screening functionality in Viewpoint does in seconds what would have historically been impossible to achieve manually.
For regulatory reporting, it is a similar story. Changes in reporting frequency, content, and format – for example, XML refiling – mean that without a solution that stays ahead of the technology curve, service providers will be unable to perform their regulatory obligations.
Credibility
Functionality by itself is not the key, though; relevant practical functionality designed by professionals, for professionals, is.
Any software developer can create functionality, but that is not the same as a solution provider with a proven development framework delivering relevant functionality based on a roadmap that has constantly evolved to represent the needs of its client base.
Identifying a suitable supplier requires identifying a professional entity management service provider that is niche – a Google search is not likely to be the best way of finding a solution. Indeed, this may result in finding the provider with the biggest advertising budget, not the best solution.
In many cases, peer referral and globally recognised accreditations (such as ISO 20000 and ISO 27001) can bring insights that a service provider’s website cannot.
For example, what do existing clients think about the support services? How responsive is the solution to industry changes? How many people are dedicated to developing and supporting the solution in which you are interested?
Viewpoint offers a trusted partner, a strongly stakeholder-oriented organisation. We believe that our long-term client partnering approach to our solution delivers unparalleled quality and client involvement. Many of our clients have been with us for more than 15 years.
Our solutions are fully integrated with industry-relevant functionalities beyond that of any other entity management system.
Our commitment to improving our clients’ operations via digitisation and digitalisation over the past 25 years is unquestionable. Viewpoint is the only truly international entity management solution provider.
Not only do we have clients in more than 80 jurisdictions, support service providers in more than 13 jurisdictions, and support resources speaking 10 languages, but our turnkey solution also comes pre-configured (including statutory forms) for more than 30 countries.
Finally, our team, and approach to what we do, is genuinely client focused. This has made us the largest global entity management solution provider in the world – yet we have no sales team or advertising budget. Our growth has been purely client-satisfaction based.
Viewpoint as a solution provider holds the ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management Systems (ISMS) accreditation. This essentially certifies that Viewpoint’s ISMS processes are regularly independently audited to conform to the highest international standard – a very prestigious certification.
From an in-solution perspective, we offer the latest tools to help our clients stay safe. For example, we offer AES 256-bit encryption, two-factor authentication, and multiple security models. And for our cloud clients, we utilise the security of the state-of-the-art Microsoft Azure hosting security facilities.
• Contact Viewpoint today and let us show you why entity management providers are not all made equal: goviewpoint.com