The BoardiGO governance platform facilitates the organization and running of meetings. It is both a productivity tool and litigation insurance. In this article, Julien Jenoudet, CEO of BoardiGO, explains what this application is, who it is for and what its challenges are.
What is corporate governance?
Corporate governance refers to several decision-making entities. It brings together the boards of directors (also called boards), the general assemblies, the supervisory boards, the committees, the sub-committees... It is it which draws the main lines to be followed by the management. It also represents the "G" of the abbreviation ESG to designate corporate social responsibility.
In short, governance is a performance lever. However, today it is subject to two contradictory pressures:
• Regulatory pressure: governance comes up against ever more precise laws and regulations, with which it must comply.
• Productivity pressure: the tasks are numerous, and the teams in charge of corporate governance are not extensible…
We have therefore developed a solution to address these two issues. BoardiGO is an all-in-one tool. It is the only one on the market to manage the governance process from A to Z.
How does BoardiGO work?
It is a SaaS software, accessible in web and mobile versions. Many companies still manage their governance manually, even after the acceleration of digital transformation was accepted and welcomed during the pandemic period, where digitalization proved to be a guarantee of efficiency and performance.
The BoardiGO application is initially aimed at corporate secretaries. They are mandated by the supervisory board or the board of directors to take care of day-to-day governance. They convene meetings, write minutes, forward documents, etc. This governance backbone can be external (handled by a law firm, a fiduciary, an accounting firm, etc.) or internal to a company. In which case, the responsibility lies with the corporate secretary.
BoardiGO is also designed for board members. It allows them to access meetings online to easily consult documents, and even to sign or vote live. Thanks to our work on consistency, data is updated in real time for each of the players. This is a competitive advantage of our product.
Can you give us other examples of features?
BoardiGO offers two types of features to optimize corporate governance. The first one allows you to improve your performance. We can illustrate this with three examples:
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Our Scheduling poll, a module to save time before meetings. It is essential to their organization, because it avoids endless email exchanges. From BoardiGO, the corporate secretary simply sends several possible time slots, for which the participants will have to check boxes in the application indicating their availability. Once the answers are received, the corporate secretary chooses a date and time and sends them the meeting invitation. Once the meeting is created with BoardiGO, it appears in Google, Outlook, etc. calendars;
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The document request tool is another time-saver. It can be used when documents need to be signed. The corporate secretary must first create a document request in his calendar. Automatically, an email from BoardiGO requests the signed document to the concerned persons who must then click on the link provided and upload the expected document. If this is not done in time, BoardiGO sends a reminder.
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Finally, before meetings, our automated board-pack tool is also very important. The board-pack is a single PDF document that contains all the documents shared on the platform before the supervisory board or board of directors meeting. On BoardiGO, as soon as these documents are entered into the system, a single click automatically creates a board-pack. The documents are even sorted according to theֹ'agenda of the meeting ;
We have many other features that can be tested during our free trial period.
What about the second type of functionality?
It concerns compliance. These features have been designed to comply with the Audit Trail. They are beneficial, even necessary, for all types of entities, including regulated entities, such as investment funds or banks. The regulator usually wants to know what has been produced in terms of governance. Our Audit trail offers specific dashboards to trace the past and future of a corporate governance.
It is even possible to export this governance to Excel. The document records the date of the governance event (the event), its type, its title, who initiated it, the directors present and the decisions taken. If in doubt, simply click on a link to find the event in question!
Our clients know that American and European regulations require more and more transparency in order to ensure the proper functioning of the company, but also to prevent fraud. They are also willing to invest in this dimension, as failure to comply with these requirements can result in financial, criminal and reputational penalties that can be far more costly than the investments to meet them.
To conclude, what do you see as the challenges ahead?
Our strong growth can be explained by the reality of the market: the equipment rate is very low. We are very often confronted with customers who do not have digital tools. So there is a lot of evangelization work to be done around digitalization. The first challenge is to convince them to take this step, and then to choose BoardiGO.
Then there is the challenge of security. First of all, it concerns the security of documents. As such, BoardiGO is a Microsoft Azure partner and is audited by a third party to anticipate any internal or external attack. As for the security of our users' identity, it is preserved by a private cloud that hosts our own high security hardware.
