When Morgan Stanley agreed in February 2019 to pay C$19.15 a share for Solium, a 40 percent premium, many outside Calgary asked the same thing: who was Solium? The company administered employee share plans for some of the biggest corporations in Canada, and for decades it had been a quiet success. A Calgary Herald columnist once called it the city's best-kept tech secret.
It began in 1999 with two financial advisers, John Kenny and Mark Van Hees. Both worked in Calgary, a city where oil and gas companies were paying staff in options and shares long before most Canadians had heard the term equity compensation. Kenny's earlier career included Mackie Research Capital and Canaccord Genuity, the kind of Calgary brokerage floors where such plans are managed.
That is a long road for a small company, and the document trail shows no big venture round to rely on.
Their idea was narrow. Companies needed a clean way to administer share plans, and spreadsheets were no answer. Solium built software for it, and its first customers were names on the Calgary skyline, TransAlta, Encana and Shell Canada.
The company moved quickly to the public market, listing on the TSX Venture Exchange in 2001, only two years after founding. It became profitable in 2004. That is a long road for a small company, and the document trail shows no big venture round to rely on. It had to stay profitable by serving clients well.
The next decade was about breadth. Solium bought Transcentive from Computershare in 2010, then CapMx in 2012, Capshare in 2017 and Advanced-HR in 2018. It opened offices in London in 2011 and Sydney in 2014. Its customer list moved from oil and gas boardrooms to technology firms and startups, which hold much of their wealth in shares nobody can easily sell.
Marcos Lopez, who led the company as chief executive, stayed on as head of the business after Morgan Stanley completed the purchase on May 1, 2019. The price was about C$1.1 billion, or roughly US$900 million. The company was renamed Shareworks and folded into Morgan Stanley at Work, alongside retirement and financial wellness tools.
For first-time founders the useful point is the patience on show. Kenny and Van Hees did not chase a flashy category. They solved a dull problem for a handful of demanding clients, reached profit in five years, and then kept acquiring until the whole world needed what they had built.