From the back of a napkin to global provider

Solium Capital literally started on the back of a napkin in 1999. Two local investment advisors, John Kenny and Mark Van Hees, saw an opportunity to build an online brokerage, using stock plan administration as the entry point. With money from friends and family, they contracted local IT firm Bitonic Solutions (since acquired) to map out the architecture for their vision of stock administration as a software service. Shortly thereafter, that vision was sketched out on a napkin at a Calgary diner, ultimately becoming the global product known today as Shareworks™.

The idea behind Solium Capital and the product now known as Shareworks™ is straightforward, and yet ambitious – change the way employee stock purchase plans are administered and accessed by participants. Older paper-based or manual models of stock plan administration were plagued with a high degree of inaccuracy and lack of reporting or feedback. Solium set out to build an innovative stock plan administration experience for financial professionals, HR professionals, plan administrators and plan participants on a web-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

“Throughout our history, Solium has learned as we went along to package and price to meet the needs of the market,” says Lynn Leong, Executive Vice President, Finance & Administration

In 1999, with money from friends and family, investment advisors John Kenny and Mark Van Hees set out to build an online brokerage using stock plan administration as the entry point to retail customer relationships. It was a fairly bold move in 1999 when software-as-a-service, now all the rage, was embryonic. They knew from their work as brokers that traditional stock plan administration was slow, clunky, and fraught with errors, so the market need was evident.

They contracted Marcos Lopez, then CEO of Bitonic Solutions, now Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Business Development at Solium, to architect their vision for a web-based stock administration application. Lopez and the founders sketched out the architecture for their vision on the proverbial back of a napkin. They set up shop with used office furniture they hauled themselves from the freight train it came in on.

Continued...