Case Study
Using Governance.com to effectively run Board & Committee meetings
The Client: A Luxembourg-based Alternative Investment Fund Manager (AIFM) overseeing €16Bn of assets. The company is a branch of a UK Asset Manager and has 17 full-time employees, including four conducting officers. The AIFM was set up in 2017 due to Brexit.
The Problem
Information-sharing between the conducting officers and the Board of Directors was ineffective.
The sharing of information between Luxembourg and the UK has always been a challenge since multiple platforms and technologies were used. Communication via email and storage in Excel files was not efficient and did not always reach the required recipients.
Additionally, the planning of meetings involving people situated cross-border posed a challenge and board packages were sent out last-minute.
Board members spent a lot of time following up on documents or action points resulting out of the meetings.
The documentation had gaps and was spread all over the place. This has led to additional workload during the Audit process and CSSF visit spent on finding the requested information.
The
Solution
Governance.com connected the various levels of business and made information available to the Board of Directors and senior staff.
Issues across business lines and hierarchies are centrally stored in Governance.com, and follow-up is monitored by the system.
Board members and staff were able to access the latest versions of documents, and any missing documents were flagged. All committee documentation is available in a structured manner.
As a result, board and committee meetings were planned in an effective manner with the support of well-developed processes and automation.
Implemented controls feeding dashboards with the business status allow the Board of Directors to have a complete view on the company's Governance.
The complete committee and meeting structures including the participants and agendas were built in Governance.
Automated processes create tasks around the meeting (e.g. collecting agenda items, circulating the agenda, etc), which can be accessed by the meeting participants. The timely feedback is constantly monitored by the controls implemented.
Any task and control running can be monitored via the integrated dashboards.
The
Results
The solution has been live since 8 months and the client has already noticed considerable time savings across all process steps.
Meetings are now planned in a structured and transparent manner.
The next step is to implement the same practice by integrating the legal entities involved in the investment structure in order to ensure good governance.