The Universal Group
Corporate structure, regulatory compliance and Company secretarial services
The Universal Group provides a range of company secretarial, procurement, translation, and regulatory services to clients worldwide, including start-ups and some of the world’s largest companies.
The Universal Group supports businesses in over 100 countries, providing services and skills for projects such as mergers and acquisitions, regulatory compliance, corporate structure, and governance. We provide cost-effective, highly experienced support on a flexible and cost-effective basis that is available to clients across their entire enterprise.
Services Offered By Us
Corporate Governance consulting, Forming a company, Company Secretarial, Legalisation, Translation and Interpreting, as well as procurement, are just few of the services we offer here at The Universal Group
Company Secretarial
The Universal Group can support you in delivering company secretarial experience across your entire organization. Either providing the services of an experienced company secretary on an outsourced basis or adding flexibility and support to existing company secretaries on a local or international basis. We can act as a local company secretary to various internationally distributed entities, reporting to a group company secretary, take on key tasks such as providing a central solution to manage the legalization of documents for use internationally across the entire organization, freeing up the corporate secretaries time and reducing the cost burden of managing many notaries and lawyers across multiple jurisdictions great simplifying vendor and supply chain management with a single point of contact.
We provide qualified share registration specialists to help you manage the transfer of shares for unlisted companies based in various jurisdictions, provide an outsourced VISA and travel documentation department, and help you manage your corporate entities with full compliance wherever they are.
We can provide all of the services of an experienced in-house company secretary or take over specific routine tasks, enabling you to maximize the use of in-house resources to avoid burnout, increase job satisfaction, and give back time to your in-house team to focus on the more proactive and beneficial aspects of the role. Retain the best people by engaging them with your key priorities and allow us to deal with the more mundane tasks with total peace of mind.
Nominee and Non-Executive Directors
The Universal Group provides experienced nominees and non-executive directors. Whether as part of restructuring an existing business and implementing a more effective corporate structure, incorporating new entities, or adding complementary skills to balance the board. TUG enables expansion into a new jurisdiction or market while improving decision-making to support best corporate governance practices as efficiently as possible. TUG provides the right people with the right skills and experience to enable our clients to achieve their strategic objectives.
Regulatory and Statutory Compliance for Enterprise customers.
Regulatory compliance has never been more all-encompassing than it is today. With Annual or even Bi-Annual routine obligations to banks, brokers, national registrars, and other competent bodies and financial institutions, compliance obligations can take a vast amount of time to manage.
For anyone involved in managing changes in beneficial ownership, or even just simply providing the right ‘know your customer’ / due diligence, or ultimate beneficial ownership evidence in the proper form, to regulated organizations, such as banks, brokers, and investors, this can be an extremely frustrating process. Failure to provide the appropriate documents in the correct form in a timely fashion can lead to funds frozen, bank accounts inaccessible or even canceled, and financing options lost.
The Universal Group has extensive specialized experience in this field, with over 15 years of managing compliance for various companies in various jurisdictions. TUG continues to be present on committees and working groups set up by various state bodies and supranational organizations to maintain a clear view of changes in the regulatory landscape as they develop. Compliance challenges have become a common topic of conversation with clients, who often tell us that regulatory and statutory compliance has become an almost unbearable burden to their business.
Fortunately, The Universal Group can provide specialized support and maintain documents in good order so that when the time comes, you always have the right documents, with the right information, appropriate to the situation at any given time.
We can also provide an outsourced compliance support solution tailored to your environment. TUG can also address many more complex and specialized compliance issues with specific regulatory obligations, such as those involved in trading in conflict-affected metals and minerals or working as part of a supply chain with exposure to conflict-affected and high-risk environments.
TUG will work with you to enable you to successfully evaluate, manage, and protect your organization from exposure to a wide variety of risk factors across many environments, whether locally or as part of a global supply chain management program.
Anti Money Laundering and Ultimate Beneficial Ownership support for Financial Institutions
As a regulated company, the requirements surrounding anti-money laundering and related compliance can cause your compliance department to balloon in size. In many regions of the world, the need for experienced compliance officers and specialists has expanded beyond the available talent pool, leading to a talent shortage and a constant effort to catch up with the needs of the business. Leaving companies with a serious challenge. Trying to train inexperienced new recruits and unleash them on a frustrated and concerned client base can lead to customer attrition and missed opportunities. Or worse, deviations in compliance where risk assessment has failed, leaving the enterprise open to fines or other measures from national banks and regulators.
The Universal Group provides experienced compliance officers who can augment your existing capabilities, provide an experienced point of escalation, or simply provide a flexible resource to balance peaks and troughs in compliance requests.
We also work with customers to monitor and develop the monitoring process, ensuring that risks are managed, changes in compliance requirements are understood, and relevant process enhancements are integrated into the evaluation process for optimal risk assessment based upon the client’s criteria and industry best practice.
We provide a range of capabilities, from process development and implementation to outsourced resources to augment existing teams, such as compliance officers, a dedicated head of compliance to work with and manage your existing team, document management, translation, and a variety of other anti-money laundering-related support services.
International Procurement
Due to our wide-reaching customer base and focus on a range of clients in various vertical markets, it is often beneficial for The Universal Group to source key services, equipment, and supplies on behalf of a business partner. This provides the benefits of a single vendor solution across a wide range of services, products, and equipment providing enhanced accountability, cost-effective sourcing, and reduced management overhead.
Clients of our procurement service also benefit from long-term established relationships with a track record of delivery and benefit from credible, proven understanding built up over many years.
In many cases, while our customers may only need a service on a transactional or project basis, our relationship with that supplier is very much a long-term partnership that drives focus and accountability from the service provider as a long-term strategic partner.
For many of our partners, the broader nature of our customer and partner base means that our customers can streamline their vendor management process, consolidating what used to be many, even hundreds of separate local relationships, under one point of accountability able to drive accountability, in turn, benefiting from the consolidation of business across our account base. These services vastly simplify compliance, accounting, reporting, and vendor management, supercharging efficiency while benefiting from opportunities for cost reduction in almost every area.
Languages & Translation
The Universal Group can provide certified translations for almost any world language, including many specific dialects, through our in-house team and an army of vetted and proven translators built up over more than 15 years of translating for companies, governments, and supranational organizations in over 139 countries around the world.
We offer accurate, secure, reliable, and cost-effective translation with the accuracy you would expect of a service created to service the international legal services industry. We have accumulated vast experience across many specialist environments with a deep understanding of the terminology involved. We routinely translate deep technical documents in Law, Pharmaceutical / Medical, Information Technology, Military and Security, and Highly Technological Research.
We also provide international interpreters to support you on a short to long-term basis. These can provided as a service on a flexible basis, even supplying an appropriate vehicle, or driver with appropriate language skills if required.
The Universal Group can also support your overseas or international conference with a single point of contact solution, including equipment, interpreters, and various support services. This allows you to host a successful, smoothly running event without introducing the risk and complexity of managing multiple vendors and technology services.
Corporate Governance
The Universal Group provides a range of corporate governance services. From an introductory ‘health check’ to long-term governance support as an independent third party. Whether it is as a third-party reporting function for a specific function, such as ‘whistleblowing’, or a Non-Executive Board function, we offer an independent third-party perspective that can ensure that your organization is aligned with best practices in corporate governance and demonstrably utilizes monitors and measures processes for the most effective decision making possible while constantly evaluating the process itself for the opportunity to evolve management processes.
Apart from addressing a particular problem that the company’s management has pre-identified, The Universal Group can provide a general healthy check style, risk assessment, covering, strategy formulation, delegation, remuneration, and all aspects of corporate governance.
Sadly, too often, the board of many companies develops inefficiencies in how they are run, and less-than-ideal decision-making processes evolve without the company ever understanding that processes have been mutating into something that is not serving them as well as they ought to.
Addressing this to reduce risk and improve overall governance can require auditing from an independent perspective, removed from the day-to-day challenges that arise. We can help you re-engineer a process that works better for you, reduces risk, enables a more agile business, and provides the launchpad to allow your business the best possible opportunity to reach the goals you set out to achieve.
Effective Relationships
Relationships are important to us. Conversations about a challenge or change in the business's circumstances or a new market opportunity or direction that the company seeks to address help us understand our customers' changing needs and drive future service development. Our services have all been designed in partnership with customers to help them address the real and tangible challenges they have faced in the real world. Listening closely to what our customers tell us about the issues they face is the foundation upon which The Universal Group was created and the basis upon which we will continue to add value to our customers. As any 'TUG' customer will tell you, it is the investment and commitment to our relationship that continues to drive our value to them and has enabled such productive collaborations and excellent results over the years