“We have various long term incentive plans for our senior executives only (i.e. no all employee schemes). We are looking to use a bespoke software system to administer these plans and wondered what software or tools other companies were using to administer their executive plans – and their experiences of these systems.”
We also looked at Sharetrack for our discretionary and all-employee schemes and thought it was a great solution. However, we were attracted by the convenience of a “one stop shop” with Capita, our existing registrars, who now also act as trustee and administrator of all the schemes with the provision of both a corporate and employee portal, coupled with their dealing service. We have only just implemented the solution; whilst I am confident it will be for the best in the long run, the implementation has not been as smooth as I would have liked and sometimes it felt like Capita were making things up as they went along and we were teaching them what to do. Early days yet, though, so I may end up eating my words! If you have a relatively small number of senior execs only, I would probably recommend Sharetrack (Accurate Equity was also impressive, but I think their UK entity has now gone into liquidation).
We use Howells’ SchemeTrack for our Executive Plans. It was easy to implement and Howells have been easy to deal with and supportive.
We have recently engaged with Cytec Solutions whose product is Sharetrack. We use it to administer our DBP, LTIP and unapproved options, plus an International Sharesave scheme, all of which were previously on spreadsheets. Their service has been great from the word go and they have been very flexible about meeting our specific requirements. When we put this out to tender, I found that their system was slightly more flexible than others. They are a smaller provider (at the moment) which gave me comfort that we were going to get more of a bespoke service despite the fact that we are probably not a big client for them. My colleagues are also impressed with its reporting function for IFRS2 purposes and there are many other bolt ons that you can add to enhance the system further.