Companies will no longer receive reminders letters from Companies House, as part of the organisation’s push towards ending paper communications with its users.
From 9 November, Companies House will contact companies that receive paper reminders to tell them it is withdrawing these. Doing so will save the organisation £1.2m annually. It is asking companies to use its email reminder service, which sends automated alerts to up to four addresses when documents are due.
Companies House has been providing online services for 20 years and plans to become a “fully digital organisation” by 2025 according to its corporate strategy for the next five years. It plans to look for other ways to shift outbound paper services to digital notifications and plans to eliminate paper output in 2023-25.
“Our intention is to make sure 100% of the services that we offer have a digital journey to them; that’s our aspirational goal,” Ross Maude, the agency’s director of digital, told CSW's sister title PublicTechnology in January 2019.
Digital filing was used by 84% of companies in 2019, with the resulting data made available to third parties, and in October Companies House released an API providing extended automated, near real-time access to the company information it holds. The organisation believes its freely-available data is worth up to £3bn annually, with the new API designed to allow users to find out about changes more efficiently.
Companies House is also making identification verification mandatory for company directors through a digital process that it expects will take minutes to undertake, making the data it holds more reliable.
A version of this story first appeared on CSW's sister title PublicTechnology