SmartSuite for the Corporate Secretary

Charters, delegations and board policies are held in Policy Management with review dates, approvers and every prior version, so when a director asks what was in force on a decision date you can show it.

Meeting dates, paper deadlines and review cycles sit in one calendar with automated reminders to authors and chairs, so papers arrive on time without you chasing each committee separately.

Governance workflows in Entity & Corporate Governance Management route draft minutes to the chair for approval and keep resolutions with their date, giving each meeting a single approved record with its audit trail.

Collect annual independence confirmations and conflict disclosures through forms, store them against each director in Entity & Corporate Governance Management and surface anything that affects committee composition.

Registers of directors, officers and shareholdings are kept per entity with that jurisdiction's requirements attached, so the General Counsel and the Regulatory Affairs Manager work from one entity record.

Inquiries logged in Regulatory Inquiries link to the policies, minutes and filings they concern, so the response draws on the governing record rather than a search through shared folders.

The AI Assistant in a SmartDoc field drafts the governance statement and committee reports from board composition, independence and policy records, leaving you to edit the judgment rather than assemble the facts.

Annual board and committee evaluations go out as structured questionnaires with reminders, results are aggregated for the chair and the agreed actions are tracked to the next cycle.

Granular permissions keep board papers, director disclosures and sensitive matters visible only to the directors and officers who should see them, with activity logs showing who accessed what and when.

General Counsel

The Corporate Secretary runs board and entity governance: board and committee calendars, agendas, papers and minutes; entity records, registers and statutory filings across jurisdictions; director appointments, independence, conflicts and disclosures; the board-level charters, delegations of authority and governance policies; board evaluations and governance reporting; and the tracking of board actions and resolutions to completion. They advise the chair and directors on governance codes and listing requirements, acting as the board's guardian of process and record.

Policy Management holds board charters, delegations of authority and governance policies with review schedules, approvals and version history, so the Corporate Secretary can show which version the board approved, when it is next due for review and who signed it off. Review dates trigger the work rather than relying on memory, and superseded versions stay available for reference. That version trail is what a governance code review or a regulator's question about delegated authority needs.

Entity & Corporate Governance Management tracks statutory filings, registers and entity obligations per jurisdiction, each with its deadline and the evidence of completion attached. For a group with entities in several countries, the Corporate Secretary sees every filing due by entity and jurisdiction in one place and can evidence that each one was made on time. Regulatory Inquiries holds any follow-up from a regulator about a filing, with the Regulatory Affairs Manager working in the same record.

Issues Management logs each board action and resolution with an owner and tracks it to completion between meetings, so the Corporate Secretary is not reconstructing the action list from the previous minutes the week before the next board. Owners see what the board asked of them and when, the Audit Committee Chair and the Board Risk Committee Chair can see the status of actions from their committees, and the completed list becomes part of the record for the following meeting.

SmartSuite produces governance dashboards and the inputs to board packs and the annual governance statement from live records: the policy register, the filings calendar, the action log and director disclosure records. Instead of collecting inputs by email, the Corporate Secretary assembles the pack from what is already maintained, and the General Counsel reviews it from the same records. The annual governance statement draws on the same sources, so what the board was told during the year matches what is disclosed.

Start with the entity list and its filing calendar, the board and committee calendar, the current charters and delegations of authority, and the open actions from recent board meetings. Those four sets give you statutory tracking, policy version control and action tracking from the first month. Director disclosure records can follow as the next annual cycle begins. The Governance Program Lead and the Ethics and Compliance Lead usually share the policy and disclosure records, so one register serves the board and the compliance program.

In ESG & Sustainability Management the governance pillar of ESG disclosures can draw on the records the Corporate Secretary already keeps: board composition, director independence and the policy register. Rather than answering an ESG questionnaire from scratch each year, the governance data is drawn from the maintained registers and the evidence sits behind it. That matters under reporting regimes such as CSRD, which expect governance disclosures to be evidenced like any other, and for stock-exchange and investor stewardship expectations on board composition.