The most overlooked governance failure of 2025: Your signatory records

Every organisation knows how to track budgets, resource, and operational costs but very few measure the hidden inefficiencies caused by outdated signatory management practices. Yet these are some of the biggest silent drains on governance teams.

Think about how much time your team spends locating the latest list, checking outdated spreadsheets, confirming a person’s authority via email, or chasing sign-off because no one is certain who holds approval rights for a given task. These aren’t occasional inconveniences, they’re woven into the operational fabric of large organisations. 

Multiply these micro-delays across a team, department, or even a global structure, and the numbers become staggering: hundreds of wasted hours a year, weeks of delays in transactions, filings, or approvals, and frustrated staff simply trying to do their jobs.

What makes this worse is how invisible the cost is. Authorised signatory management often has no clear owner, no budget line, and no dedicated resourcing. It lives in emails, shared drives, and personal knowledge, guaranteeing inefficiency and making improvement difficult to quantify.

For Company Secretarial teams already stretched between compliance expectations, board reporting, and entity management, this hidden cost adds unnecessary pressure. And when an audit appears, those invisible costs suddenly become very visible. If an organisation can’t clearly demonstrate who had authority at a given point in time, frantic verification across legal, HR, and operations becomes unavoidable.

Real-world example: Union Bancaire Privée UK (ex-Kleinwort Hambros) faced exactly this challenge. Maintaining multiple authorised signatory lists across departments and locations created inefficiencies, delays, and audit risk. By implementing Cygnetise, they were able to centralise signatory authority, automate tracking, and provide staff with instant visibility. This reduced the administrative burden by over 90% while maintaining full compliance and security.

The good news? Governance teams don’t need more work. They need fewer hidden burdens. Cygnetise eliminates the inefficiencies caused by outdated signatory lists, giving CoSec teams a single, centralised register of truth. Less chasing, less rework, and more time for strategic governance.

Whilst other priorities come and go, the irritant of signatory management remains. Often overlooked this is definitely an easy win for many organisations to take control. Most institutional errors occur because a lot of small errors compound. With Cygnetise we get a double win; we take control of the hidden unknowns and create efficiencies across all teams involved in the process.

In order to learn how we can help your organisation please contact one of our team.