You want to assign someone to keep an eye on things that can be fully automated?
It's a basic accounts payable function, so yes.
Someone has to have authority to maintain and modify the automated payment schedule, otherwise either anything can be added/removed or nothing can be added/removed. Moreso, someone within their accounts payable department should be specifically responsible for all these particular kinds of payments: trademark fees, site ownership fess, official registrations, patent renewal fees, etc. That person should have lost their job today.
I'm a bookkeeper, I would lose my job if my employer's domain was cut off because a) I didn't pay the account, and b) my excuse was, "<shrug>I don't read that email account any more."
Hell, SOE is a large enough corporation in its own right that they should have someone whose sole job is to make sure contact information at vendors is up to date in response to structural changes and staff movements, as well as checking email accounts for employees who are no longer at the company or divisions that no longer exist to ensure that critical info isn't being lost. And an entirely separate person (but working in the same section) whose job is to make sure SOE's internal contact & billing information is updated for all of the major clients, to ensure that SOE itself is also sending accounts to the right companies/divisions and contacting the right people at those companies, to prevent SOE from causing similar embarrassments to SOE's major clients/partners/etc.
And Sony Corporation (the parent) should have at least one person whose sole job is to liaise between those "Contact Managers (internal/external)" in the different subsidiaries and major divisions of Sony, to ensure that the whole group is up to date.
And that person should have lost their job too.
Seriously, fuck that guy.