This week, we feature another installment in our series of guest blog entries by NASPP Conference speakers. Today’s entry is written by Joseph Purdy of Solium Transcentive, who will lead the session “Risky Business: Ten Ways to Protect Your Equity Programs.”

Risky Business: Ten Ways to Protect Your Equity Programs
By Joseph Purdy of Solium Transcentive

Life is full of risks; it is what makes life so interesting. It is how you navigate through the tidal wave of challenges that these risks pose that measure the quality of your success. Well, like everything in life, equity compensation plans involve many different types of risks. As an issuer’s plan administrator, you are responsible for understanding those risks and taking any action possible to mitigate them. It is a daily game of covering your…assets. This includes protecting your job, your reputation, your company, your executives, your shareholders and your most valuable resources–your employees.

Though I have spoken at many conferences, including several local NASPP chapter events, this is my first time on the “big stage” at the national conference. I am very excited to present with a great and diverse panel with years of experience in plan administrative services along with in-house administration, education, compliance, tax and legal services. I have the honor and privilege to present with Emily Cervino of Fidelity Investments, Renee Deming of Cooley and Lori Brennan of UBS Financial Services.

When putting this panel together we wanted to make sure the audience would walk away with a list of suggested procedures to verify or put in place to help mitigate risk. We wanted to ensure this wasn’t like other risk-based sessions we’ve seen over the years that simply scared you with the consequences of risk but really didn’t talk about how you can help mitigate the risks. Our topics will range from grant issuance to taxation and data flow to communication. We’ll also discuss some differences between in-house administration versus plan outsourcing scenarios with a strong emphasis that outsourcing your plan does not diminish your responsibilities for oversight and risk mitigation.

An interesting thing happened on the way to submitting our slide deck to the NASPP. We too ran into a risk situation due to the content of our presentation. The risk was identified by an internal process established by one of the firms represented on this panel. Since our presentation title includes the name “Risky Business” we couldn’t resist putting some pictures from a certain famous ’80’s movie into our slide deck. We were sad when we were told our presentation would create a copyright risk and all the pictures had to be removed. At the same time, it reminded us that risk review policies like this are imperative. This means our funny pictures of Joel, Lana, Barry and even Guido have been replaced with boring pictures of dice–sorry.

Make sure you join us for what should be a very interesting and informative panel. “Risky Business: Ten Ways to Protect Your Equity Programs” is session 4.2 on Tuesday October 9. See you there!

Don’t miss this session, “Risky Business: Ten Ways to Protect Your Equity Programs,” presented by Joseph Purdy of Solium Transcentive, Emily Cervino of Fidelity Investments, Renee Deming of Cooley, and Lori Brennan of UBS Financial Services at the 20th Annual NASPP Conference in New Orleans, October 8-11.