EquityList Product Updates

A dedicated ‘Exercise Settings’ tab is now available under Company › Settings. It consolidates many rules that govern how—and when—employees can exercise their options, reducing manual overrides and audit follow-ups.

What’s included:

• Exercise payment-deadline rules: Set a hard calendar date or a rolling ‘N-day’ window, add a daily cut-off time, and decide whether employees can cancel exercise requests even after FMV is locked.
  
• Exercise payment-completion condition: Choose if employees can proceed to exercise e-signing
  • ‘On Transaction Success’: allows eSigning immediately after the payment gateway confirms, or
  • ‘On Payment Settlement’: allows eSigning only after funds are credited to your company’s account.
    
• FMV calculation method: You can now select the formula as
  • [Default] ‘Average of Opening and Closing Price’, or
  • 'Last Trading Day’s Closing Price’, or
  • A custom formula that matches your internal valuation policy.
    
• Employee payment notification controls: Toggle the payment-deadline banner (a notification banner on employee dashboard) and payment-reminder emails (automated emails to follow up with employees) on/off with a single switch to match your communication cadence.
  
• Offline payments: Choose whether or not you wish to allow offline payments for exercise requests, like cheques and challans.
  
• Bank-account routing: You can now select between using a single MID (Merchant ID) for both the exercise cost and perquisite tax or separate MIDs for both accounts.

Why it matters:

No two companies handle option exercises the same way. Our new settings let you control every step so the workflow fits your policy, not the other way around. Few cap-table tools offer this depth of flexibility, and it removes the need for manual fixes or maintaining multiple side spreadsheets.

We've upgraded the activity logs (Admin > Activity Log) to show you exactly what changed in each record update. This enhancement gives you precise visibility into all modifications made across your equity data.

How does it work?

• New ‘View Changes’ button: When reviewing the *Activity Log*, you'll now see a ‘View Changes’ button next to any update action. Click it to reveal a detailed comparison of what was modified.

• Chronological change history: The change history displays all modifications from newest to oldest, with each entry showing the date, time, and person who made the change.

• Field-by-field comparison: For each update, you'll see exactly which fields were modified and the specific before-and-after values (e.g., ‘Title’ changed from “ENG” to “Engineering” or ‘Passport’ changed from [blank] to “QWE 442321”)

[Note: This feature works for all new changes going forward. The historical records updated before this enhancement won't display detailed change information.]

For every ESOP scheme, we've introduced granular control over stock option expiry periods with the new configurable vesting leg expiry settings. This enhancement gives you more flexibility to define customized expiry rules both during employment and post-termination.

What's new?

• Vesting leg-based expiry at scheme level: You can now set a uniform expiry duration for all vesting legs across all grants within a scheme, establishing a consistent policy for when options expire if not exercised.

• Extended post-termination expiry options: While termination-based expiry rules have always been available, you can now additionally configure vesting leg-based expiry under these conditions, with the ability to set standard time periods like weeks/months/years.

• Tenure-based expiry calculations: Create expiry rules that scale based on employee tenure, such as:
  • 0.5x tenure for employees who served less than 2 years
  • 2x tenure for employees who served 2+ years

This feature lets you set up expiry rules at the scheme level that automatically apply to all grants, saving you from having to manually configure these settings for each employee.

[To find these settings, select any ESOP scheme - listed under ‘Equity Plans’ in Equity Awards > Grants - and edit the ‘Exercise Period’.]

What's improved?

Two-step login process with multiple options: The new login flow first asks for a user’s email address, then offers different authentication choices between:

• One-time password (OTP) sent to the user’s email
• Google account sign-in
• Single Sign-On (SSO) through the company's identity provider (like Microsoft, Okta)

Under Admin > Permissions, we've introduced a comprehensive permission-based access system that gives you precise control over what each team member can view and modify within the EquityList platform.

How does it work?

• Default roles with customizable permissions: Under Admin > Users > [Username], each standard role (’Admin’, ‘ESOP Manager’, ‘Editor’ etc.) now comes with default permissions that you can further customize by toggling specific access rights on or off (through Admin > Permissions).

• Create custom roles: Define completely custom roles with specific permission sets based on your team's responsibilities. E.g., create a "View-Only ESOP" role for team members who need visibility without edit rights.

• Detailed permission toggles: Control access at a granular level across various functions, including:
  • View/manage grants and schemes
  • Access to analytics and activity logs
  • Dashboard visibility
  • Bulk upload capabilities

• Easy user role assignment: Quickly assign or update roles from the user management section (Admin > Users), with changes taking effect immediately upon page refresh.

This feature gives you the flexibility to align platform access with your company’s structure and security requirements, ensuring team members have exactly the right level of access they need.

When creating new ESOP/SAR/RSU grants (Equity Awards > Grants), you’ll see a redesigned grant creation experience with a vertical stepper form that provides helpful context and streamlines the entire process from creation to execution.

What's changed?

• Contextual grant insights: When you enter the number of stock options, you'll see helpful data like -
  • How this grant compares to others in the same pool (percentile ranking)
  • What percentage of the company’s total ESOP pool this grant represents
  • The employee's ownership percentage on a fully diluted basis

• Flexible exercise period settings: For post-termination cases, the default exercise period is selected but you can toggle it off and specify a custom period.

• Execution options for different workflows: Based on your needs, select from multiple grant completion paths:
  • Save draft without executing it
  • Request company e-signature (maker-checker flow), or
  • Complete full execution in one step