Whether you're a major international corporate with multiple entities across a global legal structure, or you're a smaller, more contained company just trying to find a way to grow compliantly, entity management is key to modern governance and business operations.
And yet, many organizations don't give entity management or compliance operations the attention and resource it needs to be fit for purpose in this environment of increasing global regulation and demands for more and more transparency. Those in charge of governance, risk management and compliance, or GRC, for any organization must be able to surface the correct, accurate and most up-to-date information whenever a regulator or auditor asks - which is nigh on impossible if you are relying on manual tracking or a series of spreadsheets.
That's why many compliance and governance teams are turning to technology to streamline operations - and increasingly, they are turning to Diligent Entities.
Diligent Entities was built to make the work of the corporate secretary and legal operations teams more streamlined, more efficient and more effective. The cloud-based entity management solution has grown to become the market leader, with a 98 percent customer retention rate and more than half of the Fortune 1000 counted as a customer. Let's look at just four of the reasons driving such success for Diligent in the crowded legal tech space.
Tackle the increasing burden of global compliance
With regulators across the world increasing the complexity and volume of requirements, the task of the general counsel, the corporate secretary and the legal team becomes harder. There is more data to handle and more deadlines to hit, and most businesses are now looking for ways to drive efficiency to ensure they can meet these requirements. It's a heavy responsibility to ensure compliance across all entities. Missed deadlines can cause major headaches for companies, no matter the size of the breach or the organization; you could be facing anything from a slap on the wrist to serious reputational damage that can hit the share price or even land the directors under house arrest. A slight issue in a small entity could cause ripples all the way up to the holding company. Then there's the matter of internal compliance obligations to ensure the terms of contracts are met, that policies and frameworks are followed correctly, and that GRC matters are in hand. Diligent Entities helps organizations with this compliance burden by reducing the manual effort of maintaining accurate information; it digitizes document signoffs, enables efficient reporting and provides automation, which also helps to manage compliance dates. Furthermore, the team keeps developing the platform; soon, you will be able to benchmark your compliance program and identify remediations to address gaps you may not yet know about, all to help drive better reporting.Create a single source of truth for the corporate record
With the burden of regulation getting increasingly heavy, the one thing you don't want is to decipher conflicting accounts of the status of the corporate record. Creating a single source of truth for entity data is not just about making the legal team the official guardians of entity information; it's about ensuring the right people can surface the right information at the right time to better ensure compliance and inform decision-making. Diligent Entities can be customized so you can add fields that suit other teams like tax, finance and treasury. Access can be granted using permission levels that ensure they only have access to the sections and information that are relevant to their job role. Reports can be set up to automatically run and be sent to relevant stakeholders, reducing the administrative burden of handling enquiries. It's about breaking down corporate silos and ensuring each relevant team has the needed information to perform their role.Streamline reporting
Reporting is vital for compliance, as is the ability to surface accurate entity information to decision-makers in the business. A good entity management system will allow you to run reports; a great one will integrate seamlessly across the organization to ensure no stone is left unturned. And as companies scale, you need a tool that makes it easy to report on your entities, that helps to flag missing information and that will help you to easily identify potential risks before they become major issues. Diligent Entities features built-in connectivity between entity data, documents, individuals and tasks that means information is easy to find and report on. It allows you to create and run reports in seconds, while a dashboard creates a visualization of the current status, allowing you to pin the most important and most regularly used reports to your homepage. Diligent Entities' integrations mean that even the most sensitive reports can be shared securely with auditors and regulators, with access revoked once they've performed their role.Build more effective legal operations
Of course, all of this is done to create a more effective, more efficient legal operations department. Technology can undoubtedly save time by automating workflows and improving data sharing. However, where Diligent Entities outperforms others is by creating visibility where other solutions cannot. Structure diagramming helps organizations to better understand their corporate structure. The tax department can more easily see how to reduce costs. Teams can easily view entity types and relationships, such as joint-ventures, branches and even circular ownership, all of which can be a source of risk. Save time on manual tasks and free up the legal department to create more strategic value to the business. By reducing costs and improving the value-add, you can provide the wider business with better support for business goals.Diligent Entities: entity management software for 21st-century legal operations
With all of this - and more - Diligent Entities is truly the market-leading entity management solution to help companies grow and do business across borders while managing compliance and governance in a streamlined way. Diligent Entities helps organizations to centralize, manage and effectively structure their corporate record to improve entity governance. This, in turn, helps to better ensure compliance, mitigate risk and improve decision-making through an integrated governance solution. Yet another reason Diligent Entities leads the market is that it not only integrates the elements of entity management into one platform - that is, a place to store entity information and documents, automate workflows and essential processes, and produce reports on governance and compliance requirements, including creating organizational charts - but it also integrates seamlessly with Diligent Boards and a secure file-sharing platform to create the Governance Cloud. This all-in-one governance ecosystem has been designed as a comprehensive array of software tools to support the processes of board directors, executives, general counsels and corporate secretaries. Working with Diligent's suite of governance, compliance and risk management tools can help you to surface the right information to the right people at the right time in order to both complete routine business processes and inform business strategy decisions using real-time entity data. Get in touch and request a demo to see why Diligent Entities is the market leader in entity management and board management solutions.![](https://annyazommq.cloudimg.io/https://dg-staging-450520-cd.azurewebsites.net/-/media/project/diligent/master/au-whitepaper-images/whitepaper-images/a-buyers-guide-to-esg-data-management-software.png?h=511&iar=0&w=765&rev=263be577-e761-4e63-96ef-8ab461f2c7d1&org_if_sml=1&force_format=webp&hash=66FFC6017BFA4AEF4FEB228C028B7AA2)
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