The Securities and Exchange Commission’s successful introduction of a complete, end-to-end, and paperless incorporation process has earned recognition of the Philippines as having one of the best company registration systems in the world.

The Corporate Registers Forum (CRF) awarded the SEC formally the CRF 2025 Innovation Award for the SEC Zuper Easy Registration Online (ZERO) System in a conference held in Tunisia last October 7 to 10.

The CRF commended the SEC alongside the Companies & Corporate Affairs Registry of Belize and the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority of Singapore. Germany’s Ministry of Justice of North-Rhine Westphalia was also recognized under the excellence category for its AuRegis project.

Through the CRF Innovation Awards, the international body of corporate registries recognizes its members who have rolled out initiatives that empower internal and external stakeholders, increase effectiveness, productivity and efficiency, streamline processes, and improve customer satisfaction.

“It is an honor for the Commission to be recognized once again for its initiatives to improve how we do business in the Philippines. We will continue to identify bottlenecks in our processes and leverage digital tools to provide more efficient services to the transacting public,” SEC Chairperson Francis Lim said.

Launched in July 2024 as part of the Commission’s third wave of digital initiatives, SEC ZERO is an application under the Electronic Simplified Processing Application (eSPARC) that removes the need for wet signatures and notarization, as well as the submission of hard copies of documents required for registration.

The system is powered by the Electronic SEC User Registration Environment (eSECURE) which provides risk-based credentialing, and the Electronic Submission Authentication Portal (eSAP), which utilizes one-time passwords to authenticate SEC-required documents digitally.

By enabling the digital authentication of documents, SEC ZERO provides entrepreneurs with a complete, end-to-end and paperless process, allowing them to register their companies anytime, and from anywhere in the world. It also shortens the registration process to as fast as less than a day, resulting in an average processing time of 1.88 days since its launch.

In 2023, the Philippines also received the CRF Innovation Award, in recognition of eSPARC, the automated system developed by the Commission in 2021 which streamlined the company registration process.

The Commission’s digital transformation, beginning in 2021, played a crucial role in boosting company registrations, allowing the SEC to log record-high company registrations and to eventually breach the 50,000-mark in 2024.