How portfolios fragment
The first domain was registered by a founder on a personal card. The agency that built the second website registered three more under its own account. A product launch needed a campaign domain and marketing bought it on a company card that has since expired. An acquisition brought a portfolio of twenty names at a registrar nobody had heard of. None of this was wrong at the time; it simply never got tidied.
What goes wrong
A renewal fails because the card behind it was cancelled, and the name lapses into an auction where a competitor or a squatter picks it up. A departed employee still holds the login to the account that contains the main brand. A password reset for the registrar account goes to a mailbox that no longer exists. Each of these is survivable once; together, over years, one of them will bite.
The consolidated state
Every name in one registrar account owned by the company, not a person. Two-factor authentication with the recovery route documented. Registrar lock on everything and registry lock on the names that matter most, so that a transfer or a nameserver change needs a human at the registrar to approve it. Multi-year renewals on core names, funded from a company payment method with a second one on file. And a register, one page, listing each name, its purpose, its internal owner, its expiry and where its DNS lives.
We run this as a custody engagement, but the standard is the point, not the supplier. Any company can do this itself in a fortnight.