Hong Kong boardrooms take baby steps on digital path
As paperless meetings have become an international practice to cut costs and enhance communication, HK has a lot of catch-up to do
HSBC and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing have become the first locally listed companies to introduce paperless boardroom software to cut costs and enhance communication among directors.
However, Hong Kong lags international practice in using paperless software to handle directors' meetings.
"Digital paperless software delivered via an iPad or Microsoft Surface tablet has swept through the boardrooms in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia in the past few years," he said. "Hong Kong is lagging this trend now. However, I believe the city will catch up soon and many companies will shift to a digital boardroom in the next five years."
The British company set up an office in Hong Kong in April to serve HSBC, HKEx and Jardine Matheson. It is also in talks with a number of locally listed companies, government agencies and charity organisations about its boardroom meeting software.
Traditionally, company secretaries have to print out thousands of pages of documents, which have to be physically delivered to all directors by courier. Baldwin said that involved a lot of paper and was costly. If a 14-member board had six meetings in a year, it might use more than 12,000 pages of paper for its meetings, he said.