A FTSE100 Company Secretary writes...
Can anyone suggest an alternative to using Diligent Insights for our company admin including Share Plans and electronic filing? We have been advised by Diligent that CoAct will be discontinued and we need to switch to Diligent Insights at an increased cost. We used Blueprint prior to switching to CoAct some years ago.
We use GEMS by Computershare. Fine for filings etc but we have not used it to run share plans as we have outsourced to the share plan administrators. As we have online access to their systems we do not want to duplicate in house.
We do use GEMS for directors interests etc and find it quite good for that.
Diligent acted similarly after they acquired Boardpad from ICSA Software … and tried to force us on to their Diligent board portal … however their T&Cs were very unfriendly and very long! Plus I had little confidence that they would be fair on pricing going forward. For the Board Portal we went to Board Intelligence and have been pleased with the package. Otherwise we are using Blueprint (until they force our hand with this package too). We have recently received an email from Diligent urging us to upgrade (at 50% discount!) to the new “diligent entities platform” … so I reckon Blueprint will be disappearing in the next period of time. We use Centive for our in-house share plan management – but our processes could run on spreadsheets (we are not that large or complex) – it is a simple to use, not too expensive package which suits us.
So, I wish you luck in finding an alternative and will also be very interested in replies that you get as to alternatives, particularly for entity management.