Simplifying your corporate structure

What EY can do for you 

Group structures can become increasingly complex through acquisitions, mergers, joint ventures and organic growth. This can lead to increased costs, as well as difficulties managing risk, simplifying operations, improving transparency and complying with changing regulation.

We can help you achieve the following benefits of simplifying your group structure:

Financial

• Reduced compliance costs
• Capital and cash efficiencies
• Optimisation of distribution streams and removal of dividend blocks
• Rationalisation of intercompany balances
• A simpler group structure that maximises the efficiency of your operating model
• A structure that minimises 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

How we can help

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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 resourced with technical knowledge only.

4. 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 organisation, 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.

5. Entity eliminations

We have experienced Licenced Insolvency Practitioners in the UK who act as Liquidators to facilitate the elimination of entities with access to our international network of solvent liquidation specialists for eliminations in other jurisdictions.