TARP Recipient with a Variety of Equity Compensation Awards

This Fortune 100 financial services firm was a TARP recipient that granted a variety of equity compensation awards to over 10,000 employees. These conditions created reporting requirements that were too complex for the firm’s antiquated administration system to handle. However, replacing the old system was not an option.

Our Role

The awards that our client granted included plain vanilla stock options, restricted stock units, and performance awards. But because of the old system’s limitations, the client could export administration data only for outstanding awards.

We worked around this issue by comparing grant-level outstanding award balances in the current period to outstanding award balances in the prior period. The difference between the two yielded grant, exercise, and cancellation records. The client then reconciled those values with the data stored in their HRIS system.

After validating the data, we turned our attention to the financial reports. Our client’s reporting calculations were complex because the firm had about 100 different award pools. (A pool is a group of awards with identical provisions, where the only difference is the quantity granted. For example, if 10 employees in division A receive the same award structure and 20 employees in division B receive the same award structure, two pools would exist.) In our client’s case, 100 award pools meant 100 different performance multipliers to be assessed each reporting period.

The client’s reporting needs were further complicated by their TARP obligations. TARP recipients must field questions from management and the US federal government on what is often short notice. The questions can be difficult, requiring extensive forecasting and detailed what-if analyses to answer appropriately.

To help our client manage these complexities, we created a fully automated financial reporting solution with built-in planning and forecasting capabilities. The solution provided monthly (past present, and future) expense data for each grant. Each grant could be linked to a cost center, division, P&L line item, country, LOB, and so forth.

Results

Today, our client can deliver up-to-date, highly detailed reports as frequently as they need. As for those ad hoc forecasting and planning questions, our client can now answer 95% of them in as little as 10 minutes.