Simplifying your corporate structure

What EY corporate simplification services can do for you

Group structures can become increasingly complex through M&As, JVs and organic growth. This can lead to increased costs, as well as difficulties managing risk, simplifying operations, improving transparency and complying with changing regulations.

We can help you achieve the following benefits of group and corporate simplification:

Financial

• Reduced compliance costs
• Capital and cash efficiencies
• Optimization of distribution streams and removal of dividend blocks
• Rationalization of intercompany balances
• A simpler group structure that maximizes the efficiency of your operating model
• A structure that minimizes tax leakage on the repatriation of cash

Nonfinancial

• Improved transparency and corporate governance
• Greater control and risk management
• Enhanced board and investor perception
• Approaches to address the lack of “corporate memory” around unknown contingent and legacy liabilities
• Reduced management time spent on nonoperating entities

Broad experience

We have experience supporting the complete spectrum of organizations, whether large multinational companies seeking to reduce their global entity footprint or a small domestic organization looking to remove a single entity from its structure for a specific purpose. Our corporate simplification team integrates restructuring, tax and financial consulting knowledge to help your organization assess, rationalize and simplify its legal entity structure across the key phases of corporate simplification:

• Setup: A critical part of successful corporate simplification is to define objectives and governance from the outset. We support clients to initiate their internal setup, including facilitating a workshop with key stakeholders in which we share lessons learned and leading practices from our deep and varied experience.
• Group complexity analysis: We can undertake a desktop analysis of a legal entity structure to provide advice and recommendations on which entities in the group could be eliminated and to identify “quick wins” to generate momentum.
• Program management: We have a flexible approach to supporting program delivery, ranging from taking full control and responsibility for running the program to supporting internal program management resource with technical knowledge only.
• Due diligence and issue resolution: We deliver a bespoke questionnaire to facilitate the collation of entity information. We use our extensive experience to identify potential risks and to provide commercial, pragmatic advice and leading practice solutions to resolve identified issues. As a multidisciplinary organization, we can draw on subject matter professionals across sectors, technical disciplines and geographies to respond quickly and efficiently to any additional support our clients may require through the life of the program.