Despite advances in digitisation, company structure and record keeping are largely analogue. Company documents include definitive records of key stakeholders - such as shareholders, directors, security holders and creditors - and documents formally setting out the rights that parties have in the company and its assets.
Companies need to manage their information to satisfy statutory and regulatory reporting requirements as well as contractual and other reporting obligations. As corporate activity moves online, paper-based corporate records can create a gap in the use of technological innovation. This creates a barrier to digital transformation in corporate governance and reporting and may stifle innovation around how companies interact with the wider economy (for example, how they acquire one another, trade with each other, pay their taxes and get funding).
The Digital Company project is developing a digital infrastructure for private limited companies that includes natively digital corporate documents (meaning documents that are created in a digital format), a smart legal contract-based register, and smart legal contract-based compliance and administration processes. This represents a fundamental component of the digital economy - one in which the corporate form is itself natively digital and capable of integrating directly with software systems, capable of using innovations such as machine-readable regulation and cryptoassets and reducing transaction costs.

Summary

Digital company

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