Customer stories
Beca has transformed its annual share offer round thanks to Orchestra’s award-winning bespoke solution
We caught up with Dean Bratley, Beca’s Group Financial Systems Manager, to discover how Orchestra has transformed Beca’s employee scheme offer, saving its share registry team months of work each year.
About
New Zealand-founded professional services consultancy firm Beca is one of the largest employee-owned businesses in the Asia-Pacific region. With over 4,000 global employees, Beca’s employee share scheme is a key focus for the firm, with around 1,600 employees owning a stake in the business.
Before Beca worked with Orchestra, the annual share offer round was very labour-intensive, time-consuming and a huge manual process for the share registry team.
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Dean Bratley, Beca Group Financial Systems Manager
Beca’s unique employee-ownership structure
We’re proud to be an entirely employee-owned organisation, with around 40% of our employees owning a share in the business. Our broad share scheme comes with a range of shareholder levels and a maximum ownership level to ensure no one individual has an undue influence or ownership.
We do an annual offer round and share offers are made to employees who consistently contribute to Beca. These offers vary in size depending on your employee level (e.g., Associate, Senior Associate, Principal, Senior Principal), with multiple suggested shareholding-sized tiers within these levels.
The challenges Beca faced with its previously labour-intensive share offer round
Before Beca worked with Orchestra, the annual share offer round was very labour-intensive, time-consuming and a huge manual process for the share registry team. Until recently, to make an employee shareholding offer, we would print out physical copies of the offer letter and mail them to employees because we didn’t even have a mail merge functionality originally. For context, we’d manually send around 1100+ offer letters out in envelopes.
It was very hard to track who had accepted the offer. We would have no idea how many offered shares were taken up until we received back the signed offer letters in the mail, or in the last few years, people would email us their acceptance. It would take us around three months to know where we stood with each share offer round, and offer rounds could take six months plus to complete.
What attracted Beca to Orchestra
We were unhappy with how time-consuming and cumbersome the manual paper-based offer process was for some time. But there was a school of thought that Beca’s situation was too complicated and had too many variations to digitise.
I looked at several options on the market, and I liked the approach Orchestra was taking. Other providers were limited in what they could offer, whereas Orchestra could deliver us a flexible, bespoke solution because they were coding on their own platform.
Now, all of it is in our Orchestra dashboard, and we can instantly see the uptake of shares as everyone electronically receives their offer and responds online. Our share registry team couldn’t believe the real-time reporting in Orchestra when they first saw it.
Dean Bratley, Beca Group Financial Systems Manager
How Orchestra designed a bespoke solution for Beca
I worked closely with Orchestra’s developers and team on the platform build. I project managed the build from the Beca side and did all the detailed BA work to build the workflow maps and processes we needed for the share offer round. Orchestra then digitised those workflow maps to create a nice front end.
The communication from Orchestra’s team and their availability throughout the project was excellent. We had to make changes at quite short notice, probably a lot shorter than other vendors would have given me, and Orchestra made those changes for us within hours.
Orchestra has transformed Beca’s share offer round and workflow
Thanks to Orchestra, our annual share offer round is now much easier to manage, less labour-intensive and time-consuming. Now, all of it is in our Orchestra dashboard, and we can instantly see the uptake of shares as everyone electronically receives their offer and responds online. Our share registry team couldn’t believe the real-time reporting in Orchestra when they first saw it.
Orchestra’s platform has saved our share registry team months of work for our annual shareholder offer. We send out the offer invitations in February or March, and before Orchestra, it would take us until October or November to wrap up an offer round. Our share registry team would spend June, July, and August working through the paperwork and email responses for those who had accepted the offer. But now, with Orchestra, they can have 90%+ of the offer round finalised by July.
The day the share registry team really saw how transformative Orchestra was, was after the first set of offers went out, and they saw people accepting the offer in real-time in Orchestra. That’s when they realised this was game-changing.
It’s not just our share registry team that has positively benefited from Orchestra. Now, employee shareholders can accept or decline the offer digitally via Orchestra in minutes. Plus, if an employee needs to take out an employee loan to take up their offering, they can arrange this debt online in minutes - versus the months it could previously take for some to organise this manually via traditional banking methods.
We conducted an employee shareholder survey at the end of this year’s offer round and found that 93% of participants positively rated Orchestra. The most common feedback was about the amount of time Orchestra saves them, as they no longer have to print out, manually sign and return their offer letters. They also love how all the offer information is at their fingertips, because it’s digitally linked.
An award-winning solution
A component of Beca winning the Mid-Market Debt Transaction Award at the INFINZ Awards in 2024 was the bespoke solution that Orchestra built for us for our bespoke debt refinancing solution that forms part of the Orchestra share offer round process.
“Beca now boasts a more resilient and future-fit Share offer round and registry service that has truly resonated with our employee shareholders. The shift away from paper-based documents and signatures for almost all shareholders marks a significant milestone.” - Mat Croad, Group Finance Director at Beca.
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