The digital management platform, which helps businesses to digitise governance and shareholder relations, has already raised £300,000 of its £500,000 target from investors in London, Hong Kong and Australia.

Shaparency was established in August 2020 in response to the business conditions resulting from Covid-19 and allows organisations to digitally transform their board, shareholder and meeting operations. Originally a product of the pandemic’s impact on society and the changes affecting the business landscape, such as working from home and social distancing, the platform will focus on democratising processes as normal business begins to resume. While the future will not be wholly virtual ,having the ability to digitise operations such as hosting AGMs and voting creates more accessibility for shareholders.

The technology allows boards to communicate securely with shareholders, providing a portal for them to access company reports and minutes, vote, join meetings, and chat with other investors. It also seeks to disrupt board structures by providing in-depth profiles of the board members. This transparency will aid the diversification of boards, improve performance benchmarking and encourage further tech adoption.

Globally, there are currently only 15% of corporate boards which use digital platforms due to the cost of doing so being prohibitively high and, generally, board members to date have not shown technological proficiency. Shaparency offers a highly competitive SaaS model which will enable boards, from SMEs and charities to multinationals, to better adapt to the new environment, increasing efficiency, improving transparency and fine-tuning governance.

Ben Nowlan, Shaparency founder, said: “Over the past seven months, we have gained clients globally and have successfully launched in the UK, US and Australia. We are proud of the progress we’ve made so far and are now raising capital to help us grow and increase partnerships. Business leaders are beginning to understand the need for digitised operations to build reliable, secure and transparent company governance structures and our platform can provide this. Covid-19 has accelerated the need for modernising business operations and, on the other side of the coin, shareholders are beginning to demand more transparency and better access to the companies in which they invest.”

Christian Brown, the managing director of a mid-sized financial services firm commented on Shaparency from a customer perspective saying: “This product is revolutionising the way that we manage our document administration both internally as a company and in relation to our client operations where we are the Administrator, the Convenor, the Minute Taker, the Director or the Shareholder for our clients. No more print, sign, scan, email, no more long explanatory emails with instructions and circulating documents, just use the platform to grant access, store, dialog, agree, record minutes, amend and agree them, sign and submit.”