Taking OWNership: October’s key technology updates

It’s been an intense month of development launching our decentralised share register, but the platform is now live and we are already receiving a steady stream of companies signing up!

Here are some of the key things we’ve been working on during October to help businesses understand and manage their shareholder data better…

What we’ve been up to — our key developments in summary

• Decentralised Share Register (DSR)
• Business Analytics reporting
• Shareholder hierarchy and beneficial owners
• Additional registers
• Introductory tutorial

Business Analytics: getting to know your data better

The main feature that went live in October was our Business Analytics reporting tool, which uses Microsoft Power BI-embedded functionality to access and analyse shareholder data. In order to give companies immediate data insight into their members, Power BI accesses data through direct query mode, using on-premise data gateway — we’ll discuss this architecture in a separate technical blog soon.

The aim of our Business Analytics tool is to give companies using our DSR extensive detail on their investors and asset structures. The reporting dashboard is interactive to enable quick and easy analysis, with ‘clickable’ charts that filter information in real-time, so business owners can drill down to the insights that matter most.

There are three ways in which users can analyse their data:

General analysis — view information such as top investors, asset KPIs, and company versus individual holder distribution

Demographic analysis — segment individual investors or investor groups by their age, gender and holding (if companies are logging this level of data), for more detailed insights

Geographical analysis — map where shareholders are located in the world to understand target markets and activity hot spots

Introducing Beneficial Owners

In addition to our Business Analytics tool, we also launched a new functionality to help companies manage beneficial owners behind the registered investor or nominee listed on their list.

Some businesses will have registered investors that are holding shares on someone else’s behalf, known as nominees. They are really interested in the ‘real’ asset owner behind the nominee — the beneficial owner — who receives benefits such as dividends and voting rights.

Through smart architecture, our new feature enables companies to identify real beneficial owners within their register, to better understand their holding structure, including any persons of significant control (PSCs). This not only helps them to understand shareholder voting behaviour in greater detail, it can potentially prevent a hostile takeover.

This design feature will enable organisations to manage complex stakeholder relationships and complicated nominee structures easily, and make use of all the member data available to them when making business decisions.

Creating additional registers

While most of our clients are initially using the DSR to manage their main shareholder register, in order to increase issuer transparency, we’ve developed the ability to add lists of significant stakeholders to the platform.

For example, companies can also now store information on their:

• Board of directors
• Company secretaries
• Persons with significant control (PSCs)

More importantly, clever back-end design means we are able to factor in all the different roles that one person may have within a business, without the need to duplicate information. Through our technology it’s possible for someone to be a director, shareholder and a PSC at the same time, but for their details to only stored once.

We’ll be continuing to develop this feature as we move towards creating an ‘investor identity management system’ in the future.

Additional registers are created and maintained in exactly the same way as our main register, making it very easy to use, and companies can simply select which register they would like to update when they log onto the platform.

Introductory tutorial now available

Last but not least, to help businesses get started with managing their share registers online, we have created an online tutorial. This digital ‘how to’ guide takes them through a series of easy-to-follow steps, explaining the key features of our DSR. Grey pop-up boxes provide instructions on what they need to do in order to create, edit and update their shareholder records.

That’s all our key developments for now; we’ve also been busy working on new products for Own’s equity platform, but we’ll save further updates on those for our next blog post.

What do you think of our latest technology updates? Is there anything else you’d like to see? Email hello@weown.com to share your thoughts with us.

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