A FTSE250 Company Secretary writes...
“We are considering tendering the administration of our share plans (both SAYE and LTIPS) and have been made aware of Global Shares, Share Works and YBS. Does anyone have any recent experience of working with these administrators that they could share? Or, does anyone have any other positive recommendations for any other providers? Many thanks.”
I moved our plans to YBS last year – SIP and discretionary plans. Transition was seamless from their part and service is excellent, would definitely recommend
We use Global Shares for our executive plans. It’s not been a great experience, lots of changes in the team and quite a few basic errors. Wouldn’t recommend.
We use Equiniti for our International Sharesave Scheme and they are very competent – although they are not able to hold savings funds in all our jurisdictions. For LTIPs we use spreadsheets.
We have a relatively large LTIP which is administered by Computershare who also provide a corporate nominee service. Our international Sharesave is administered by Equiniti. Really good service by both. They are split for historical reasons as neither could offer the international elements of both plans when we last tendered. I suspect the offering has expanded since and both could support all elements of our plan now.
We use Shareworks – no material problems so far and they are nice team to work with. There have been a few surprises on costs though so I do think companies should work through these very carefully during the contract process.
The Shareworks platform offers real time dealing which was a big plus for us.
Just to add my experience, for what it is worth – our executive share plans are relatively small and simple and we’ve administered them ourselves using spreadsheets (YBS are the carrier for our all-employee SAYE plan). But we did have a look at third party administrators, to see if there was anything cost-effective and with sufficient added benefits to justify using a third party. Sad to say that nothing leapt out at me, so we decided not to go with any of them. of the proposals we had Link (registrars) were quite impressive, but in the end not really cost-justified
We have recently moved our share plans onto Investec’s portal (having previously managed these manually). We have received excellent service from our contacts at Investec and the portal itself is priced competitively.
https://www.investec.com/en_gb/corporate-advice/corporate-finance-and-corporate-broking/share-plan-services.html