Certent survey: 78% of equity teams fear systems won't scale

A new Certent report exposes a widening gap between the strategic demands placed on equity teams and the fragmented technology supporting them.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Sat, 17 October 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

A robotic arm segment with a quad-camera array hangs centered over a miniature asphalt road, in a brightly lit modern lab setting with blurred lab equipment and server racks in the background.

Certent, the equity management software provider owned by insightsoftware, has published its 2026 Equity Management Outlook, revealing deep-seated anxiety among equity professionals about whether their tools can keep pace with corporate growth. The survey, conducted by Hanover Research across 400 US-based equity management professionals in Q2 2026, finds that 78% are very or extremely concerned their current systems will not scale as their organisations grow, a striking number given that nearly three-quarters (73%) already report using AI in some capacity.

The headline tension in the report is structural. Equity teams say they now spend 56% of their time on strategic activities, analysis, planning, and stakeholder engagement, yet 58% still describe their role as primarily operational. The implication is that the technology layer has not kept pace with the seniority ambitions of the function: teams are being pulled toward the boardroom while their tooling keeps them anchored to the back office.

Fragmentation and broker lock-in compound the pressure

The technology landscape equity teams are navigating is notably fragmented. Forty percent of organisations run three or more equity management systems simultaneously, and 57% still rely on spreadsheets as active tools. The barriers to fixing this are themselves layered: 43% cite technology limitations as the primary obstacle to automation, 42% struggle with data quality, and 39% face integration challenges between systems.

Reporting bottlenecks illustrate the cost of this fragmentation most vividly. Despite more than 99% of teams having at least partial real-time visibility into equity compensation data, 51% still require five or more hours to produce a standard equity compensation report, a paradox that points to poorly integrated pipelines rather than a lack of underlying data. Meanwhile, 76% of public-company equity teams say they are locked into broker relationships they would prefer to exit, a dependency that the report flags as a particular pressure point during M&A activity or corporate restructuring.

"Equity teams are being asked to do more, but their systems haven't kept pace," said Michael Madigan, General Manager at Certent. "With IPO activity surging in 2026, combined with ongoing M&A and transitions to private status, we're seeing unprecedented cascading demands: compliance requirements shift, regulatory scrutiny increases, and scalability becomes critical."

Convergence read-across: where fintech infrastructure meets the capital markets cycle

The Certent findings land at an instructive moment for cross-sector strategists. The equity compensation function sits at the intersection of three converging pressures: a resurgent IPO pipeline (which introduces new participants and vesting schedules overnight), tightening securities regulation (which raises the cost of reporting errors), and an AI adoption wave that is advancing unevenly across enterprise finance functions.

The survey's AI data is telling. Three-quarters of teams report using AI, but only 22% use it extensively, a pattern consistent with the broader enterprise AI diffusion curve, where adoption at the periphery runs well ahead of deep operational integration. For capital-markets-adjacent software vendors, this gap between surface-level AI deployment and genuine workflow transformation represents both the commercial opportunity and the credibility risk: tools marketed on AI credentials that still require five-hour reporting cycles invite exactly the kind of scepticism the Certent data surfaces.

For investors allocating across enterprise software and fintech infrastructure, the broker lock-in finding carries a separate signal. If three-quarters of public-company equity teams want to switch brokers but cannot, that is a structural switching-cost dynamic that bears watching as embedded finance and custody-as-a-service models continue to unbundle traditional broker relationships. The pressure on legacy broker dependency in equity administration mirrors similar unbundling trends in payments, lending, and FX, and suggests the equity compensation stack may be the next enterprise finance layer to face significant platform consolidation.

Certent positions its platform as a single-system alternative covering the full corporate lifecycle, from early funding rounds through IPO and beyond, without requiring data migration at each stage.