Equity Management Solutions for Public Companies

Equity management is an on-going, complex process for public companies, encompassing everything from award granting and tracking to monitoring employee activities, reporting and staying compliant across various jurisdictions.

Here we address many common pain points and look at options to streamline your work and help ensure accurate record keeping.

Pain Point 1: Managing multiple equity awards and plan types

Solution:
Public companies typically use more than one equity award or plan type for different grades of employees and the complexity only grows as more equity vehicles are granted. If you manually manage everything on a spreadsheet, from award granting, vesting and exercising to reporting, it’s not only a hefty admin burden but it’s likely to invite disastrous human error or result in multiple file versions circulating internally.

A software solution streamlines the day-to-day execution of transactions, with full automation of tracking, and administration of all equity award activities for you. This access a single source of truth in one centralized place can avoid confusion. Importantly, equity management software can typically support a wide range of equity awards and plan types e.g. ESPPs which are common among public companies.

Pain Point 2: A significant number of participating employees to manage

Solution:
The more employees you have, the more activities you’ll need to track and manage. Managing a large amount of dynamic employee data won’t come easy either. Imagine if you forget to update some changes in employee activities or share plan tasks it could cause inaccurate reporting and wrong tax filings.

What about engaging participants to manage their own equity assets? Some stock plan providers offer an 24/7 online employee portal. Once participants log onto their account, they are allowed to track the life cycle of their equity, manage/transact their assets, and access the documentation. It’s all in the once place, which means you don’t have to worry about it getting stuck in an email chain or about participants missing any important updates.

Pain Point 3: Extensive reporting and disclosures

Solution:
The more employees and equity types you have, the more complex your reporting becomes. In addition, the reporting and disclosure requirements are generally stricter at a public company so it would be highly beneficial if your equity management solution could automate the reporting process.

Some software programs have a reporting suite built in, enabling you to directly access standard reports like earnings per share (EPS) and fair value. You should ask if you can get real-time, audit-ready reports with just a few clicks or if these can be scheduled to be automatically generated. This feature simplifies your reporting process and ensures accurate record keeping.

Pain Point 4: Offering global stock plans

Solution:
It’s common for companies to grant equity to their employees based internationally to unite a global workforce. However, staying compliant in each jurisdiction can prove challenging as local laws and regulations often change regularly.

You can offload this to a global stock plan provider that already have extensive knowledge and experience running global stock plans. They usually have robust on-the-ground teams that stay on top of the latest local laws and regulations associated with equity compensation, working alongside you to reduce the legal risks and helping you stay compliant across the entire organization.

Pain Point 5: Employee communications

Solution:
To many public companies, it’s often difficult to develop an effective employee communication program to explain the lifecycle of each award, its benefits and tax implications etc, due to the number of countries and participating employees involved.

Why not outsource to a stock plan vendor with experience in developing customized employee communications programs? They can help you segment your employees, create a communications package, demystify the equity process and translate materials into multiple languages as required.

As a global stock plan provider, J.P. Morgan Workplace has the experience and knowledge to offer you a customized, automated equity plan management solution along with a robust team of equity professionals. ⁠Contact us if you want to learn more about how we can help you administer stock plans effectively.