Frictionless entity maintenance
Some popular jurisdictions, such as the British Virgin Islands, impose yearly requirements for renewal of government licensing fees, economic substance form submissions, and ‘Know-Your-Customer’ (KYC) compliance.
The exact requirements and due dates vary between jurisdictions but the idea is the same: some degree of annual maintenance will be required to keep your entity in good standing.
Our dashboard aims to make entity maintenance frictionless and helps you avoid penalties for delayed filings.
Your entity overview will show what needs to be sent and by when for each entity and each jurisdiction. Reminders about outstanding items will be emailed to you and can be actioned by simply logging into the Otonomos platform.
If you own a number of entities registered in different jurisdictions, this feature should help to ensure that you submit all the required information by the correct dates, which are likely different for each jurisdiction.
Your entity overview will show a To Do list for each of your entities, explaining what is needed:
No more Post-its or notes: Otonomos keeps all in one place
Just click “Manage” to see full details of your companies such as registered address, company number, shareholders, directors, UBOs, and share allocations, plus all your key company documents:
Remote control your corporate actions
If some maintenance item is due, you can see the corresponding invoice either from within the “Billing Centre” or from the To-Do list on your dashboard.
Payments e.g. annual Government dues and filing costs can be made directly from within the dashboard in both fiat and crypto.
Annual reports
Think of Annual Reports as a snapshot of your company at a given moment in time, typically at year-end or its anniversary. It’s meant to document your company’s status.
Annual Reports are a near-universal yearly requirement for most jurisdictions, including LLCs in Wyoming (Delaware only requires an annual franchise duty to be paid but not the filing of an Annual Report), the BVI, Cayman, UK, and even the UAE
You can download a template from your dashboard for each, complete and sign it and we take care of the rest once you uploaded your signed copy.
Wait a Minute
Annual General Meeting minutes are another common requirement but their format is largely standardized.
As for Annual Reports, we will inform you if minutes are required and provide a template for you to complete and upload.
Declare substance
Economic Substance Declarations are needed in Cayman, BVI, Bahamas, UAE and the Isle of Man, and the system will notify you if you need to submit one.
The level of detail they require ranges from light touch in Cayman to more detailed representations such as those of the BVI.
Their overall purpose is to understand what kind of presence you have within the jurisdiction. The process of renewing your declaration is similar to the one above: simply download the template for the relevant jurisdiction from your Otonomos dashboard, add the details and upload the completed form.
Nominees
Nominee Services are also renewed annually. Otonomos offers Corporate Nominee Directors/Managers and Nominee Shareholders/Members, depending on your chosen jurisdiction.
These optional services are designed to offer you enhanced privacy and they are governed by a Nominee Agreement we will ask you to sign with Otonomos.
Here too, we have simplified the renewal process as much as possible using our platform by highlighting the renewal requirements when they fall due, and linking these directly to a convenient payment route.
All of the above functionality is live in the Otonomos dashboard and our development team is busy adding more features soon to help you manage your entities better, faster and cheaper.
What’s next?
We're further developing the dashboard to let you fully self-service your orders and manage your companies entirely digitally, without the need for outside assistance:
- Next month, we will be adding common corporate actions such as changing or adding Directors and Shareholders for your company, allowing you to submit the details of each online.
- Once submitted, leave it to Otonomos to make do the necessary to reflect your changes in the relevant corporate registries if so required. This “last mile” filing event may involve manual processing but we take this out of your hands and do this for you.
- In future we hope that more authorities will offer digital access to their systems which will speed up these maintenance tasks - either via APIs or by putting the registries themselves on blockchain! - and when they do, Otonomos will be the first to take full advantage of this.
Pro Tier and B2B reseller solutions
Further ahead, the Otonomos platform will be made available under a Pro Tier for any third party incl. other Corporate Service Providers (CSPs), legal firms, accountants, and tax advisors, that forms and maintains entities on its clients’ behalf:
- We already partner with CSPs who do not have the same broad offering as ours and use Otonomos to complement their in-house offering. They then use our Dashboard to manage each of the entities formed by Otonomos on behalf of their clients.
- In a future iteration of the platform, a Reseller solution would white-label our technology by offering a branded, “Otonomos Inside” portal for resellers to set up and manage their clients’ entities using Otonomos.
Machine learning and AI
Finally, we are gradually augmenting our online offering with machine learning and AI:
- Over the last months, Otonomos has been training an AI assistant on its internal knowledge base and is using its output to answer enquiries via its website’s web chat.
- For instance, a typical question from a visitor may ask to compare two jurisdictions, which relies on an understanding of the relative advantages of each. Historically this was knowledge held by specialists however, the same knowledge can be learned and applied using Machine Learning models which Otonomos lets crawl across its entire internal knowledge base, which it constantly refreshes and expands.
- This experimental feature is live now, but at any moment in time we can take over from the bot if questions become more personalized so you can chat with a human or submit a ticket.
Computerized corporate secretaries
The next stage of our AI journey is to have AI perform the more structured and replicable corporate secretarial functions, such as completing company resolutions and preparing them for signing within our dashboard.
Our system has all data available and would simply pull the relevant reso from our template library, complete it with your company details, and serve it up for your digital signing, all without human involvement.
We believe this AI-driven automated fulfillment of basic corporate actions can ultimately be expanded to perform most if not all corporate secretarial work, in lockstep with the power law evolution of AI capabilities, and Otonomos wants to be at the forefront of this technology.
If you would like more information about any of the services described here please contact us on support@otonomos.com or book a call with us.
