Plan Administration

Deferred compensation systems that rely on manual spreadsheets are no longer viable in today’s market, nor do they meet the stringent audit and compliance regulations that many firms are required to adhere to. It is widely reported that about 90% of all excel spreadsheets have errors contained within their formulas.2 Drawing upon more than two decades of administration experience, EWM Global has assisted organizations in addressing historic issues ranging from minor financial consequences and reporting inconsistencies due to formulaic errors, to severe miscalculations of historic distributions. In one instance, during an implementation, it was discovered that the allocation percentage for a particular investment had been inaccurately calculated through excel, leading to incorrect capital calls and payments to participants. The EWM system is equipped to detect such discrepancies, as it oversees the calculation process from start to finish. Upon identifying this issue, corrective measures were taken during the subsequent payroll cycle. Without the integration of an incentive compensation administration platform, these errors would have remained unnoticed. What’s concerning is that this is not an uncommon occurrence among excel driven plan administration.

Partnering with an experienced outsourced solution, equipped with robust administration technology, enables organizations to confidently oversee compensation programs, ensuring accuracy and consistency in reporting, even across complex international plan structures. Not only does the EWM system identify discrepancies in plan administration, our team of highly specialized plan administration experts, who have oversight of over 1000+ unique compensation processes, act as a second set of eyes throughout the plan lifecycle.

With a globally accessible platform, organizations can seamlessly manage compensation and benefits programs for diverse workforces by reducing manual data management on administrative teams, mitigating risk, centralizing processes, effectively managing participant communications and fulfilling international reporting requirements.

Plan Participant Management

Manually managing the entire lifecycle of any compensation plan presents significant challenges. When administering Deferred Cash and Share plans, ensuring the completeness of communication regarding plan lifecycle events such as award acceptance, investment allocation, reallocation windows, and distributions is a complicated endeavor without the assistance of a central platform. Managing the tracking and execution of all participant decisions and subsequent actions, while efficiently communicating them to participants, is a time consuming process. For private equity firms, ensuring timely signature and storage of all plan LPAs, communicating plan terms and conditions and updating participants on the latest carry valuations offline is a cumbersome process to manage.

Here are four ways EWM Global’s plan participant portal can alleviate the communication and administration inefficiencies of plan lifecycle events:

1. Centralized Document Management

Direct distribution to participants of customized documents, including award acceptance letters, plan rules and other individualized documents (e.g. tax documents).

2. E-Signature Functionality

LPA documents can be communicated and executed directly from the participant portal. All that is needed is the LPA format template and unique participant information and the system creates bespoke LPAs for all participants.

3. Enforced Investment Capabilities

System driven functionality captures participant investment preferences, with plan level custom reallocation frequencies. The system has the capability to enforce investment requirements based on plan mechanics.

4. Plan Lifecycle Event Communication

The EWM team handles all employee plan lifecycle communications, including award grants, reallocation windows, plan updates and distributions. Our query handling team are available to directly answer any participant queries. This team of plan administration experts handle thousands of emails and calls from plan participants every year, across all forms of long term incentive plans.