The Tribune

By FAY SIMMONS

Tribune Business Reporter

jsimmons@tribunemedia.net

The Attorney General yesterday said the companies registry will launch an integrated platform in April that will allow financial and corporate services providers to manage their businesses more efficiently.

Ryan Pinder KC said the Corporate Administrative Registry Services (CARS) portal will unveil an integrated corporate services platform, CARS Business, to better allow financial services industry players to manage their services and activities.

Speaking at the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP) Bahamas conference, he said the online companies registry portal will launch the new feature in April and firms that are participating in a pilot run of the platform “love it”.

“In April, we’re going to launch a new feature related to CARS, and it’s voluntary, but it’s called CARS Business. It will be a subscription offering to industry, but it will be kind of an integrated corporate services platform that will allow you to monitor all your clients, monitor all your employees who are providing services,” said Mr Pinder.

“We’ll do a few training sessions and demo sessions in the beginning of April for that launch in April. We have a couple companies who are piloting it now, and they love it.” Mr Pinder said CARS Business will be for each company’s personal monitoring and record keeping, and will have a bulk upload feature that will allow firms to upload annual registration applications for multiple companies at once.

“This is your portal; this isn’t a Registrar General’s portal. This is your portal to help you manage your current customer system that is seamlessly integrated into CARS,” said Mr Pinder.

“We’ll have a bulk upload feature. So if you have 150 companies, and you’re doing a bulk upload of the annual registrations, you’ll be able - instead of doing each company - to do one single bulk upload of all 150 and that will seamlessly go into CARS, follow the registration statements one time, deduct it from your escrow, and now you’ve done an annual registration for 150 companies in five minutes. This is a tremendous advantage, especially for large registered agents.”

Mr Pinder said CARS Business will also allow cross-border entities to have more “synergy” with offices in other jurisdictions.

He explained that although registrations must be filed locally, as it is a regulated function in The Bahamas, the CARS Business portal can be accessed by staff in another jurisdiction to enter the information relevant to a filing. The information can then be reviewed locally and processed through the CARS portal.

“What we are doing as a function of CARS Business is we will let your head office now do all of the prep work and all of the background work; not the filings, but they’ll be able to access because this is your portal. This isn’t the Registrar General’s portal; this is your portal,” said Mr Pinder.

“You’ll be able to access that from head office or another jurisdiction and fill out the information, for example, on registered directors. Once you get instructions from head office, then you can say let me go and review and process the file. So it brings a little bit more synergies between your head office or your other jurisdictional offices and what you’re doing in The Bahamas.”