2024 at Ledgy: Our year in review

It’s been an exciting year at Ledgy and an interesting one in the tech ecosystem. With varying funding trends, new liquidity opportunities for employees through secondaries, and a possible upcoming resurgence in IPOs, we’ve continued to evolve to empower more teams globally with equity. So what’s happened at Ledgy over the last 12 months?

Product: Year in review

This year, Ledgy made impressive strides in product development, not only improving the processes for our existing and new customers in the private markets, but also modernising share plan management for publicly listed companies. We’ve welcomed companies in both public and private markets like Bird, Butternut Box, Huel and Lendable, and are happy to count over 3500 companies across 70 jurisdictions on Ledgy. As we serve the most innovative European companies, it’s no question our team is constantly looking to build with them and bring more value to users. This year, we made over 50 larger product developments, to make sure we keep doing just that. Here are some of our most impactful developments:

Support through IPO and beyond

This year, we announced our plans to build Ledgy for public companies. At Ledgy, we want to empower every team globally with equity, and after listening to our most ambitious customers and the wider market, we knew it was time to revolutionise share plan administration for listed companies. Ledgy now supports companies at every stage - from foundation, right through their IPO and beyond.  We’ve made many changes to be able to do this, but the most significant has been to provide a frictionless end-to-end trading and settlement experience for participants and admins on Ledgy. With seamless integrations to nominee, Zedra, broker, Winterflood, and paying agent, Airwallex, participants can submit market orders directly on Ledgy and receive payments in 170 countries in more than 60 currencies. Real-time tracking lets both participants and admins follow the status of orders from the moment they sell their shares, to the moment the money lands in their account. Much more is coming in 2025!

Robust and instant financial reporting

Ledgy makes audit season worry-free for companies in the private and public markets. With robust financial reports, instantly generated from existing Ledgy data, companies can account for their share-based compensation compliantly under IFRS 2. This year, we expanded our financial reporting suite so you can now:

• Account for equity in different jurisdictions using UKGAAP or USGAAP
• Automatically calculate volatility using a peer group and risk-free rates from government bonds based on market data from EODHD
• Generate Disclosures reports to enable anyone reading your financial statements to understand the nature and extent of any share-based payment arrangements that existed during that reporting period
• Generate DTA IAS12 reports that use IFRS 2 expense calculations as input, to measure a deferred tax asset at each reporting date based on an estimate of future tax deduction
• Group expenses by cost centre or entity and allocate the expense appropriately when stakeholders move - either pro-rated based on number of days spent there or moved to the latest cost centre.

Best-in-class automation

Ledgy’s automated workflows have always been unmatched. If you don’t believe us, just check out what our customers have to say about our game-changing equity plan automation. This year we made even more improvements, to make employee equity plans and their associated workflows more smooth and accurate than ever.

Starting with granting, Ledgy now lets you set up rules to determine which stakeholders automatically receive grants once your HR Information System (HRIS) is synced with Ledgy. It also allows for a more seamless integration, enabling grant date and grant amount to be synced directly from your HRIS, if available.

When it comes to grant vesting, we’ve also enabled companies to maintain fairness in equity compensation for employees with adjusted working hours. Companies can now more accurately and automatically calculate employee vesting based on their employment percentage by entering the start date of the adjustment and the FTE %.

Finally, we’ve also transformed exercising into one seamless, automated workflow where all requests, signatures and approvals go back and forth between admins and employees in one place.

Always compliant and in control

At Ledgy, equity compliance has always been of the utmost priority and we’ve created simple ways for companies to stay compliant, no matter where they are. In addition to our already available customisable reports, detailed transaction history, enterprise-level security and more, we’ve made it even easier to minimise compliance related risks and increase control.

First, we’ve made it easier for companies to only publish what they want, when they want. After creating your draft transactions (no limits to batch sizes), you can now select which of those transactions you want to publish. You can also search and select to publish specific transactions – for instance, combing through a larger batch to only publish John Doe's transactions.

Next, we’ve increased the visibility users have on the changes made in Ledgy so they can collaborate more confidently. With Ledgy’s transaction audit trails, you can see exactly what’s changed, when, and who made the change on any given transaction.

We’ve also added 1-click downloads for compliant ERS returns. You can now download all the information you need to file your ERS returns to HMRC for EMI and CSOP, and “Other ERS” schemes to make meeting your filing deadline a breeze.

Another important development has been our partnership with best-in-class valuation experts to provide robust and defensible company valuations at competitive prices. These partners include the Big 4, and Cooper Parry.

Finally, to further validate our security processes, we are now ISO 27001 certified! Our conformity with ISO 27001 principles means that you can be confident in managing your data and security with Ledgy.

Company highlights and final thoughts

For our team of Ledgistas, its also been a wonderful year! We started the year by launching our annual State of Equity Report, which landed us coverage on Sky News, The FT and INSIDER. We also started sharing insights from the Ledgy platform in our Equity Data Pulse reports, and we published our first State of Share Plans Report focused on the public company share plan landscape.

We’ve welcomed new, key team members including James Seely as our new Head of CX and Peter Ahern, our Head of Public Markets. We got together in Milan, for our yearly company offsite to hold insightful company-wide strategy and collaboration sessions. We held our yearly hackathon, for our product and engineering teams to come up with innovative solutions fast, which contributed to some of the features mentioned above.

We’ve also held events not just for our team but for our customers, prospects and partners. We continued hosting our Ledgy Equity Breakfasts across Europe, of which we held four in total. At our flagship summit Edge, we took companies on the journey from private to public, with insightful talks on the late-stage and pre-IPO environment, the IPO process, and life as a listed company.

As we look into the future and the year ahead of us, our team is thrilled to keep building modern solutions for modern teams. Next year, you can count on Ledgy to continue to innovate, bringing more intuitive and automated workflows, financial reporting and integrations for private and public companies. We will also keep employees at the heart of what we do, making their dashboard even more user-friendly. And there’s much more to come! We are thankful to have our network of partners and customers through our journey to help us achieve our mission to empower teams globally with equity. Here’s to 2025!

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