EquityList Product Updates

Customers can now enjoy EquityList’s complete end-to-end exercise workflows. This changes the company and employee experience when undergoing a stock option exercise.

For employees, within their employee dashboards they can now head over to Exercise Requests and create a new exercise request, if enabled by their company administrators.

The new flow allows employees to:

• Select options from various grants which are to be exercised.
• Dynamically visualize the total exercise cost and notional unrealized values of the options.
• Understand tax liability on the exercise and accordingly place an exercise request to company admins.

For equity award administrators, make your way to Equity Awards > Exercise Requests > ESOP Exercises.

• You’ll now see an updated end-to-end flow to process and execute employee requests for exercising stock options.
• This includes key action items of payment reconciliation, getting employee signatures on the exercise form, and releasing a digital copy of the share certificate to them.
• Absolute control for administrators to cross-verify exercise and tax values and propose edits.

[Note: Perquisite tax is the tax on the ‘perquisite value’, which is the difference between the total fair market market value of the shares and the total exercise price paid for them. This is taxable because the difference in value is considered a benefit that’s been paid by the employer.

Notional value is the theoretical or “on paper” value that an employee stands to gain if they sell their stock options.]

Earlier, under Equity Awards, we only showed pool calculations and breakdown of units based on fully executed grants. This means that only a grant that’s been executed both by the company and the option holder will be accounted for in all forms of pool analytics.

The problem?

However, a persistent issue arises when some grants remain unsigned by the recipients (i.e., employees), even after the company has sent multiple reminders.

As a result, Grant Administrators spend significant time reconciling data between the pool dashboard and reports

Our solution?

• All pool calculations by default now account for two types of grants: Executed (by both parties) and Partially Executed (pending countersign from the recipient).
• You can revert this change under Company > Settings and toggle off ‘Include partially executed securities’.

💪 We tested this change with a larger set of power users managing hundreds and thousands of grants and - they are loving it!

🗒️ To top it off, when generating options-related reports, you can now also download reports based on the states of the grants - Executed, Pending Countersign, Lapsed, and Draft.

We’ve made major improvements to the share certificate drafting and issuance flow. Cap table admins can now seamlessly start drafting a new share certificate and issue it to the shareholder, all in one go!

You can find it under Cap Table > Shares > Share Certificates > New.

The changes include:

• Updated user interface: Guides you through the process step-by-step, making it easier to follow and reducing errors.
• Option to save work-in-progress with drafts: Allows you to pause and resume your work without losing progress.
• Automated email notifications to shareholders: On each new issue, send an email directly to your shareholder to accept and view the new share certificate.
• Record share certificate possession: Keep track of who owns the original share certificate; the company or the shareholder.
• Dynamic calculation for your ease: EquityList will automatically calculate the distinctive number of shares, the total price per share based on face value and share premium, and even the total capital contribution. You can still override these values despite the platform’s prompt.
• (For Indian companies) New data capture fields: Ensures compliance and accuracy with fields for Folio No., Face Value of Shares, Share Premium, and Distinctive Number of Shares (From and To).

We’ve launched a major upgrade to our Cap Table feature and our customers are loving the new user-interface.

• Visualize your cap table at a summary level by navigating to Cap Table > Overview. This section summarizes all outstanding shares, fully diluted shares, capital contribution, and ownership details at both the share class and instrument level.
• Moreover, head over to Cap Table > Fully Diluted to dive deeper at a stakeholder level and view outstanding shares and fully diluted ownership across all security owners: shares, warrants, and stock option grant holders.
• Click on any stakeholder’s name to see a break-up of their ownership across multiple securities.

[Note: Capital raised through convertible securities will be accounted for under ‘Total Capital Raised’.]

Buyback enhancements:

• When submitting a buyback request through their dashboard, employees can choose to receive the payment in their salary account or enter different banking information for the transaction - an important workflow for exited employees.
• In the 'Legal' > 'Templates' > ‘New’ section, we now offer customizable surrender letters for different employee groups, such as former and current team members.
  This way, letters for past employees can include their bank details, whereas those for current employees will not. This allows for two distinct templates that can be used in the same buyback.

Create and store RSU grant templates:

• Head over to ‘Legal’ > ‘Templates’ > ‘New’ to create and store RSU grant templates under a separate document category of ‘RSU Grant’. Keep things organized and easily filter between different template categories.