Comfortable management of shareholders

International healthcare real estate

Aedifica was founded nearly twenty years ago as a Belgian investor in apartments and hotels. In 2024, its focus shifted entirely to healthcare real estate.

'We want to play a bigger role than ever in a society facing a sharply increasing ageing population”, explains corporate secretary & compliance officer Thomas Moerman. “We are convinced that private investors are required to find appropriate solutions for a demographic shift. Societal engagement is definitely a part of this.'

Aedifica initially only operated in its own country, but in 2013, it decided to expand across the border—first in Germany, then in the Netherlands. 'At this time, we operate in eight different European countries', adds Thomas. 'In the United Kingdom, we have a portfolio worth over one billion euros. And in Finland, by means of acquiring another stock-traded company, we are also active as developers, not just investors. This diversification helps with risk distribution. 

Registered shareholders

Since the end of 2022, Aedifica has used Corporify as the solution for its parent company. 'Which has a a widespread international shareholding base, including also a large number of registered shareholders’, Thomas says. 'We have hundreds of shareholders. The daily tracking of who transfers which stock (in the context of donation, private sale, succession, etc.) or wishes to dematerialise or nominate shares requires considerable management. Moreover, we regularly raise money through the market and, therefore, from our registered shareholders. These operations require processing in our share register each time.'

'Sometimes, we get questions from shareholders who don’t remember how exactly they organised their holdings. Other times, fiscal rules change—consider the increase of the securities tax, for example—which also leads to additional requests.'

In the past two decades, Aedifica has filled several physical share registers. Thomas Moerman: 'At the time, we started with the letter A, and now we are at Y. All our data was added by hand, and due to the large amounts of capital increases in the past, this needed to be changed a lot. Often, we had to refer from one book to another. That, of course, means that sometimes you are close to losing a clear overview.'

All information in one place

A parallel Excel spreadsheet that tracked operations more structuredly brought some relief. However, the implementation of the Corporify platform really improved the situation. 'By using this, our share register has been completely digitised. We no longer have to update our paper books as well as our spreadsheets.'

'All information is now in one place. This guarantees that the current situation is crystal clear but also allows us to access historical data. With Corporify, we can also build additional security measures that reduce errors.'

Easy use and maintaining independence are essential aspects. 'We did extensive market research beforehand', explains Thomas Moerman. 'For instance, there was a provider who, as final administrator, wanted to validate every modification we made. That is not at all sustainable for us. With Corporify’s software, we keep full control of everything.'

The time savings are significant

'There is also the convenient download function', adds Thomas. 'In the past, we needed to hand our shareholders copies of hand-written pages, which did not look very professional.'

'Corporify allows us to download all relevant information easily in a simple Excel sheet or PDF file. Whenever a capital increase leads to changes in the share register, the software automatically makes a separate document for each shareholder. The time savings are significant.'