Computershare
Facilitating Global Governance Framework

Managing business contracts with all the stakeholders— customers, vendors, employees, and suppliers—can be a daunting task. Most global firms are attempting to bring a synergy to the contract management process across multiple locations, while also conforming to the legal directives of each region. To comply with the changing and complex regulatory environments, global firms require a consolidated and comprehensive approach that can effectively handle contract administration, corporate governance procedures, and compliance from a centralized system. Attending to these changing market dynamics, Computershare has developed GEMS, a global entity management system that helps businesses establish a centralized approach to corporate compliance and transparency in reporting and risk management.

The GEMS platform automates global entity management processes, enabling companies to stay compliant and minimize business risks. By creating a single, consolidated global structure, it combines entity management practices, regulatory updates, and compliance changes across departments for effortless administration of corporate data and documents for business transactions and filings. With over 250,000 legal entities across 160 jurisdictions, GEMS helps many global companies improve their entity management processes.

Additionally, by automating corporate governance functions such as monitoring and certifying regulatory filings and entity incorporations, GEMS reduces the complexities associated with compliance and reporting. More so, GEMS also maintains an efficient subsidiary structure to ensure all legal entities across multiple jurisdictions are tax-efficient.

Andrew Moore, President, states, “Though managing contracts is a fundamental facet of any business, standalone contract management systems can be expensive.” The GEMS platform provides powerful contract management as an added functionality within its global entity management system to provide organizations with an opportunity to consolidate systems and costs. Moore adds, “There are also many benefits to having contracts tied to the same central repository that tracks your organization’s legal entities.”

For instance, when a company signs up with new businesses, by linking contracts with entity records, GEMS can avert any outdated signers from signing the contract or avoid usage of wrong entity names, thus ensuring a streamlined contract management workflow.

We strive to help companies advance their subsidiary governance practices and go beyond entity management compliance to minimize business risk

This year, Moore notes that Computershare incorporated numerous additional features to address some of the major challenges in the enterprise content management landscape. Firstly, Computershare integrated a full-bodied electronic signature and workflow functionality into the GEMS platform to help streamline the signing process. Using this, documents can be easily sent for electronic signature from within GEMS to any recipient through an email and additionally, it also updates the certificate of completion automatically so one can have a complete audit trail of all signer events. Secondly, to address the issues around combing through contracts to find key metrics and data points, Computershare has introduced an advanced reporting module that allows clients to report on any tracked data using GEMS. “We believe these updates would add agreater dimension to the GEMS platform in transforming the way enterprise contracts are managed,” states Moore.

Computershare aims to be more than just a software provider. Moore mentions, “We strive to help companies advance their subsidiary governance practices and go beyond entity management compliance to minimize business risks.” Striding ahead, Computershare intends to focus on enhancing its post signature process to make contract management completion as seamless as the signing process. The company’s focus for the future is to optimize the global entity management framework by placing contract accessibility, data validation, and approval at the fingertips of enterprises.