How we are building Ledgy for public companies

A couple of weeks ago, Ledgy CEO Yoko Spirig announced that Ledgy is building out our capabilities to help listed companies manage their equity compliantly.

After listening to the market, our customers and their ambitions, the most natural step is to meet them where they need us. To fulfill our mission of empowering every team globally with equity, that means catering for public companies too.

Equity and share plan management in public companies means even more complexity – and compliance risk – than in private companies. Listed businesses have to deal with a larger volume of share movements and transactions, as well as tough consequences for any missed deadlines. Having accurate, reliable data on hand, enabling crystal clear communication between share plan administrators and share plan participants, is critical in order to mitigate business risk.

But despite all this complexity, existing platforms catering for equity and share plan management in the public markets are outdated and slow to innovate. Listed businesses have to fit their needs around the platform they use, not the other way around. We think public companies deserve better from their providers. So that’s what we’re building.

How we started

This might be the first time you’re reading about our plans. But focusing on the public markets was by no means a spur-of-the-moment decision. Glancing at our press releases over the last year, you might find some clues as to how all this started.

We focused first on bringing in the best talent to help us execute on our plan. Svein Petter Undheim, our Head of Financial Reporting, joined us over a year ago. Not long afterwards, we hired Peter Ahern, our Public Markets Lead.

With a combined 30 years’ experience in public company equity administration, working at incumbents such as Computershare, Shareworks, and Global Shares, Svein and Peter are convinced the market deserves better. They joined Ledgy because of the unique opportunity to build a game-changing solution.

Then in autumn last year, we hosted Edge, our flagship equity summit, in London. We welcomed equity experts from around the UK and Europe for a series of discussions on how to make equity work in scaling companies. We heard just how difficult it is to run best-in-class share plans amid all the complexity and pressure of an IPO.

Around the same time, we formed our Customer Advisory Board (CAB), bringing together a group of senior leaders motivated to drive positive change in the equity and share plan management space. Insights from Edge and feedback from our CAB gave us the inspiration and focus we needed to plan our product development roadmap for public companies.

Where we are now

We’re very excited that our work up to now means that today, we can fulfill the needs of listed companies with discretionary plans. We have already welcomed our first public customers on board. But there is much further to go.

Our share plan automation features replace manual workflows from the first time someone joins the team and receives an equity award, all the way until they exercise and cash out. We integrate with Workday, SAP Success Factors, ADP and more than 50 other HR Information Systems, so that customers can manage employee data seamlessly on Ledgy.

We cater to LTIPs, RSUs, PSUs, PSOs and many other types of share and option awards, adapting to the most complex vesting schedules and performance conditions. And with Zedra serving as the corporate sponsored nominee (CSN) for our customers, we now have the infrastructure to enable trading and settlement for participants directly on Ledgy.

Public companies have to get financial reporting right. Ledgy offers instantly generated share-based payments expensing reports that are fully compliant with IFRS 2, taking (some) of the pain out of audits and making it easier to hit quarter-end and year-end reporting deadlines. In addition, we now integrate with ShareReporter, helping companies understand the correct applicable tax rules for different jurisdictions and employees to estimate withholding taxes.

And finally, empowering teams is at the center of our mission. This means providing a frictionless and engaging participant experience. Running share plans can be complicated, but the data companies surface for plan participants doesn’t have to be. With Ledgy’s user-friendly dashboards, it’s never been simpler to share real-time updates and keep participants informed about their equity ownership.

We also know our work is not done yet! Moving forward, we will continue to listen to our customers, move fast and build new features that help Ledgy work for even more public companies.

Ledgy’s product roadmap

Our public company product roadmap for the next quarter is focused on three main pillars: compliance, automation, and new plan types.

First, we want to build a smart, frictionless trading experience for admins and participants alike. We’ll build on our Zedra partnership with new direct broker and paying agent integrations, to create the most automated and seamless share settlement process for public companies.

Having started with an emphasis on executive compensation plans like LTIPs, we will soon be shifting gears towards more broad-based plans, including Employee Share Purchase Plans (ESPPs). We plan to deliver a generic version of ESPPs by the end of this year, and we’ll be tackling UK-focused plans like SIP and SAYE in 2025.

Keeping compliance top of mind, we will also be building insider trading controls and approvals to help customers manage risk effectively. And in the meantime, we’ll continue to develop our market-leading financial reporting and participant experience features.

We’re building a modern solution for modern companies, to help public companies make equity work. Ready to level up your equity and share plan management with Ledgy? Get in touch with us now.

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