Deferring growth shares when a recipient will no longer work for the company, or if other criteria haven’t been met.
More often than not, growth shares come with the condition that the recipient must either remain employed by the company or provide services to the company that issued the growth shares.
When designing your growth share scheme, the question would have looked like this:
Depending on your answer to this question – and the relationship between the recipient and the company – processing the leaver’s growth shares is slightly different.
(You’ll be able to see the answer to this question on the leaver’s agreement summary page. We explain how to get there below)
Here we’ll explain how to process a leaver’s growth shares on Vestd when they no longer work for/with the company.
If the growth share recipient was an employee
Click View on the Growth share tile on your Vestd homepage or go to Share schemes > Growth shares via your side navigation.
From there, you will see a table of your growth share recipients. Click on the leaver’s name and you’ll be taken to their agreement summary page.
The row titled Criteria will state the condition of the leaver’s agreement.
Scroll down to Defer growth shares and select [Name] will no longer be an employee.
You must select this option if the employee is leaving the company as we will communicate this to them along with the details of their leaver terms.
Enter the date the employee left the company and select how many growth shares they get to keep. Any remaining growth shares will be deferred (cancelled).
You can also enter a reason for the deferment. In this case, simply saying they left employment and no longer meet the conditions of the agreement will do.
Once you’re happy everything is correct, click Confirm and we’ll take care of the rest.
The recipient’s My Equity page will be updated with their new total and any deferred shares, and we’ll send the appropriate paperwork to Companies House. A new share certificate will also be created should you wish to use it.
If the growth share recipient will no longer provide services to the company
This scenario also applies if you are cancelling the growth share scene for any other reason laid out in the criteria.
Similarly to the above, you will get to the leaver’s agreement summary the same way, but the final choice will be to select whether to defer all or some growth shares.
- Defer all growth shares: All unvested growth shares will be deferred. The recipient will only keep their vested growth shares. This option can be used if the recipient is no longer providing services to the company, or the agreement is being cancelled for any other reason in the criteria.
- Defer some growth shares: You can select how many unvested growth shares will be deferred. This option may be used if some of the conditions haven’t been fulfilled (e.g. the recipient achieved 70% of the sales target).
On a final note, it’s worth adding that in all scenarios when processing a leaver or deferring growth shares for any reason, you must do so in a way that is consistent with the terms of the agreement. If in doubt, please review each recipient’s agreement summary and criteria documents.
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