Eqvista Update: Electronic Shareholder Acceptance

It has become important for a lot of companies to move all their transactions online. If you have already been using a cap table application to issue shares, then well, you are almost there. There are still a few things that require the person to visit the office, such as signing the final document to complete the share issuance process.

What is the “Electronic acceptance for shareholders” update about?

To help the shareholder officially sign and accept the shares from the company, Eqvista created an update for an Electronic shareholder acceptance feature. This acceptance process is done electronically, where the shareholder just needs to click on a button to accept and finalize it. And once the signature is done electronically, the issuance process would be complete.

How does it work on Eqvista?

The process is quite simple. But before you can move ahead, just ensure that you have your profile created on Eqvista and have your company’s cap table ready. If you are not using Eqvista at the moment and need help preparing your cap table, check out our support articles here.

Once you have your things set up, you can move ahead and follow these steps below to issue shares and select electronic shareholder acceptance online for the process.

For Admin:

Step 1: Log into your Eqvista account and select your company’s profile. Click on “Securities” and then on “Equity” from the left side menu. You will reach the page where you can see all the equity classes available. Click on the equity class to issue shares.

Note: You will need to add the shareholder profile before you can begin the issuance process as shared below. To learn how to add a shareholder, check out our support article here! 

Also, you will need to share the access to the cap table with the shareholder you are about to issue the shares to. The process to share access to the cap table is very simple.

Click on “Issue shares” to select the equity class from the drop-down list available. Once you do this, an option will appear that says, “Add New Grant”. Click on this and you will reach the following page to select the shareholder to issue the shares to:

Here, you need to add the name of the shareholder in the search box.

Step 2: A new page will appear where you need to add the details to issue shares to the shareholder. At the end of the page, there is an option where you can select “Yes” on “Required Shareholder Acceptance” as below, to get the electronic shareholder acceptance done. 

There is an option where you can either attach a document regarding the issuance process, or you can get the shareholder to sign the issuance process electronically. Here, we choose the option to get the electronic shareholder acceptance with the signature. Once done, click on “Submit”. 

Step 3: As soon as you do this, the shareholder would get an email regarding this new grant and will have to approve the grant.

Step 4: Once they approve the grant, the status of the grant will be updated in the system.

For Shareholder:

Once the company issues a grant to shareholder which required approval/acceptance, the shareholder will receive an email notification:

This is how the email would look like:

Step 1: Click on “Go to Eqvista” on this email, and the shareholder will have to log into their own account or create one. And with this, they will reach the page where they will be able to see the grant details. Here, the shareholder would also be able to see the status of the grant as “Pending” as shown below:

Step 2: From here, the shareholder has to click on the grant name, in this case “F-001”, and they will be redirected to a new window where they can accept the grant by adding their signature.

Once they have added their approval, then can view the grant details from the next page, which is automatically redirected to when you click on the approve button.

Conclusion

And just like this, you can now easily issue shares online to your company shareholders without the need to come to the office and sign the documents or send endless emails back and forth to your shareholders. The signature can be taken care of online with the electronic shareholder acceptance feature on Eqvista. If you are new to Eqvista, check out the app here or contact us today!