How a FTSE 250 financial services firm’s governance team went from admins to strategic advisers

At a glance

Watch the video

Vicky Hart, Company Secretary & Joanna Meager, Independent Non-Executive Director, FTSE 250 Financial Service Firm

The challenge

keeping pace with complexity

Few governance teams operate at this level of complexity. With hundreds of entities across dozens of jurisdictions and around 180 board and committee meetings a year, the pressure on the corporate secretariat is constant. As the business grew, so did the demands on the team, and the governance function needed technology and a partner that could grow with it.

On joining as Company Secretary, Vicky Hart saw an opportunity to modernise how the governance function operated, knowing from previous experience what the right platform and partner could unlock.

The pressure isn't felt only by the governance team. Joanna Meager, a Non-Executive Director on the board, describes what it takes to prepare for a board meeting with 800 pages of material: understanding every paper, identifying questions, and maintaining a personal audit trail of everything reviewed.

The approach

choosing a partner, not just a platform

Vicky had worked with Board Intelligence at a previous employer and knew that the right platform and the right partner could make a governance team more efficient, more credible, and better equipped to support its board.

Board Intelligence had started as a governance consultancy, advising some of the world's most demanding boards, before building its technology on top of that expertise. That foundation mattered to Vicky, as she wasn't looking for a software vendor; she was looking for a partner who understood governance from the inside.

That trust extended to giving directors direct access to the support line. With Board Intelligence, she trusted the team to speak to her board directly.

When the board first used the platform, they were up and running within ten minutes. For directors, the right tools make the difference between productive preparation and ploughing through virtual pages. “The more tools you have available to help with that filtering, the better the outcome of the board.”

Impact

from administration to strategic advice

With Board Intelligence's Report Briefer, authors across 42 jurisdictions receive a direct link, upload their documents to a single platform, and the governance team is notified automatically. Around 75% of authors were using it almost immediately.

The platform has also given the team the capacity to keep pace with growth. When Vicky joined, the team was supporting around 100 meetings a year. That number has since grown to 180 and is expected to reach 250 in 2027.

The bigger shift, though, has been in how the team is seen. In the 18 months since deploying Board Intelligence, the governance team’s reputation within the business has been transformed. Where once they were handed work at the end of a process, they are now brought in at the start to help shape strategic direction. “The level of trust in the team has elevated exponentially,” Vicky says. “We're now asked to be involved at the beginning of projects. Sometimes we have to tell people to come back to us in six weeks because they're engaging us too early.”

For Joanna, the platform has fundamentally changed how she prepares for and participates in meetings. As chair of the remuneration committee, she reviews papers privately before they're circulated more broadly, giving her space to form an independent view before wider discussion begins. She reads papers twice: first for the strategic big picture, then again closer to the meeting to form detailed questions. Those questions go into shared annotations, sent directly to the fellow NED best placed to answer them, so that by the time she walks into the boardroom, much of the groundwork is already done.

Directors spend less time seeking clarity and more time on the discussions that matter. “If technology can help directors draw out key themes and discussion points, it can lead to more meaningful discussions in the boardroom,” Joanna says.

Why this matters

Research by Board Intelligence and the Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland found that the average organisation spends £2.8 million a year on board reporting, a cost driven largely by the time senior people invest in writing, reviewing, and reading board papers.

Much of that cost is hidden in administration: chasing papers, managing uploads, and troubleshooting technology that isn't fit for purpose. When governance teams are freed from that burden, something more valuable becomes possible. They stop being administrators and start being strategic advisers. For this governance team, that shift has changed not just how the team works, but how the whole organisation sees them.