Corporate secretarial services, which are required under Singapore’s Companies Act, can be broadly classified into governance, regulatory, and compliance in nature. In general, directors of companies are responsible for ensuring the accountability of several such requirements, which include meetings, financial statements, and maintaining an up-to-date registered office address. Nevertheless, it is common practice in Singapore for companies to hire professional firms to handle these services instead of conducting them in-house. There are various reasons for doing so, and these include, for example, the inherent complexities in company secretarial matters, cost effectiveness, and the professionals’ expertise in this domain.
Singapore is well known for its robust business and regulatory policies, as well as its strategic positioning within the Asia-Pacific region. That positioning allows for easy access to a plethora of business-friendly states that host a wide range of corporate organizations, from start-ups to international conglomerates. There are, accordingly, many professional firms that offer secretarial services to meet the governance requirements of such firms.
Benefits of Hiring a Corporate Secretarial Firm
With the advent of numerous accounting firms planning on expanding the services that they offer, a lot of the firms nowadays are offering secretarial services to business owners like yourself. By hiring a secretarial firm for your company, the task would be to completely remove the hassle of having to spend time on concerns like handling appointments, maintaining the company’s official records, ensuring the company’s registered addresses are meeting registration requirements, or to comply with statutory requests. Singaporean appointees are efficiently trained to guarantee swift incorporation of the company by ensuring that your business is taking off through making all your appointments, ensuring that all records are executed instantly, taking charge of your statutory records so that your business remains in tip-top shape.
A corporate secretarial firm is something that a lot of business owners would often require, but not know how much it would actually benefit the company. More often than not, companies that are both small and large would not have the knowledge, the know-how, or the time to perform secretarial services to assist in keeping the company’s statutory records. Since Singaporean companies are in accordance with the Singapore Competent Authority, Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), that companies in the country have the full capacity to maintain thoroughly updated registers of their shareholders and directors, the normal setting up of a company’s secretarial division is paramount to maximize business outputs.
The digitalization revolution brings a volume game because now top corporate secretarial firms in Singapore are able to handle a greater number of corporate clients. This brings about several benefits: the firms will be able to distribute the fixed costs more effectively. The unit cost per client may not increase even when there is a substantial salary increment that secretarial firms need to provide to keep their key personnel happy. When the unit costs decrease, the secretarial fee will be more competitive. Secretarial fees, which were known to be one of the highest cost types in a firm directly contracted to corporate secretary, are likely to decrease. Will corporate entities expect lower secretarial costs in the near future? Yes, fee reductions are likely to occur when the technological disruption is common. The operational mistakes are known to be inevitable. With the modern tools, secretarial firms are expected to provide at least the same quality (if not higher) output at a reduced cost due to automation and/or artificial learning. In short, with the ongoing digital disruptions in the corporate secretarial firms, clients have been placed in a better position.
The digitalization is ongoing. Top secretarial firms are taking advantage of it in their day-to-day operations. The keyword search can be done within minutes using deep learning, assessing potential customers whether they are a well-established entity or benefited from government grants. Staff and board members have access to company information almost instantly. When it comes to legislation, secretarial firms are able to provide advice and guide corporate clients to fulfill their obligations when new acts, regulations, or directives are released by the authority. However, the boosted demand for corporate secretarial services is not for administrative purposes. Client’s expectations have increased. Value-added services need to be rendered to further build the partnership with the business than be confined to regulatory requirements. With the new regulatory obligations and the calls for further enhancements of the anti-money laundering/counter-financing of terrorism, the future secretarial services demand could be a breathtaking one. If the learning curve of the staff of secretarial firms can match the technological advancements, then the value megatrend is likely to continue further.