Mattioli Woods Case Study

Name: Mattioli Woods
Headquarters: UK
Industry: Wealth Management and Employee Benefits

How Mattioli Woods moved on from spreadsheets and created an easy-to-manage and engaging Long Term Incentive Plan  

Mattioli Woods in Numbers:

Mattioli Woods is one of the UK’s leading providers of wealth management and employee benefit services – handling the needs of controlling directors, professional persons, owner-managed businesses and small-to-medium-sized PLCs. As such, they’re also one of the UK’s fastest-growing advisers.

The Mattioli Woods 2010 Long Term Incentive Plan (LTIP) was launched in 2013, awarding share options to senior executives, directors and consultants across the business. The LTIP was – up until its migration to Global Shares in 2019 – managed inhouse. However, by 2017, as the share plan was growing, so were the relevant activities, processes and requirements. The various Mattioli Woods stakeholders managing the LTIP were becoming more and more frustrated.

When Mattioli Woods first approached Global Shares, they had a long list of growing pains. They were spending a large amount of time, on a non-core activity. And what’s more, the way they did it left everyone unhappy: it was a constant, inefficient issue for the various stakeholders at Mattioli Woods — everything was done on paper, which made reports slow and a constant data security risk. And it was challenging for participants, because they had no visibility of their award portfolio.

Mattioli Woods was aware that what should have been seen as a great incentive – one that was supposed to motivate and retain key staff – was not achieving that aim. It therefore sought out a specialist, outsourced supplier that could manage the share plans more effectively and also ensure that this valuable equity incentive was seen as such.

The Challenge

When we looked at all the issues that Mattioli Woods was experiencing, we were relieved. When we were briefed about their issues, it sounded like the mission we had in front of us would be a long and complex one.

In truth, it couldn’t have been simpler. Every problem they were experiencing by managing their employee share plans internally was solved by one of Global Shares’ key features. By simply migrating to our system, we fixed every problem they had.

The Solution

Global Shares provided Mattioli Woods with the full range of our industry-leading software and support teams. First, we brought the share plan fully online. Two major issues that participants had been facing previously were:

• Important documents going missing/not received
• The lack of visibility of their award portfolios.

With our online, cloud-based employee portals, every participant can log in and see their equity at a glance. They can view and manage award statements, certificates, plan documents—it’s all there. And tasks, like grant acceptance, account opening, vesting and voting are all done within the portal. This all came with the look and feel of the Mattioli Woods corporate identity, making it an extension of their workplace infrastructure.

Going fully digital also provided greater data security. Global Shares is a robust hybrid cloud solution, with a full in-house team of cyber security and IT professionals. We provide a dedicated participant Service Desk, for our in house equity operations experts to provide help and assistance to users.

Moving to Global Shares also allowed vested shares to be retained in electronic format in the employee share account managed by Global Shares. This allows ease of trading in the future. Participants can see the value of their vested shares at the click of a button in real time.

As well as this, our support teams created plans to manage yearly events from vestings to AGM voting. This gave comfort to Mattioli Woods that key events would not be missed.

And, perhaps most importantly, Global Shares migrated the hassle and the headache. From the start, we interrogated the share plan’s processes, and found new ways forward. From cleaning the data, to taking over all reporting, we got things on track.

The Result

With he migration complete, Mattioli Woods’ LTIP share plan now has access to the very best the market can offer. They have outsourced their risk and can rest easy knowing their share plan is fully compliant.

Not only that, but they can just rest easy in general. Outsourcing to Global Shares has freed up key stakeholders in the company, who were previously tied down in the share plan headache. They still have full control, but it’s light touch. They point Global Shares in the right direction, and we make the wheels move forward.

The Lesson

Mattioli Woods is a clear example of the benefits and value of moving the administration of your share plans to a specialist, outsourced supplier. But it can’t be just any supplier.

The reason we were able to exceed Mattioli Woods’ expectations is because technology is at our core. We developed our industry-leading software in-house. Having researched meticulously, we couldn’t find any software that would do everything we wanted, so we built it ourselves, from scratch. And for over a decade, we’ve been perfecting it.

And we back up that cutting-edge software with the best talent and the hardest-working experts in the industry.

“It was our easiest audit to date, after we implemented the Global Shares system. We were able to access every stage of the grant, vest and exercise process in a matter of minutes.”

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