The last few decades have seen little in the way of capital markets innovation. The systems that support our economy remain largely unchanged, and the institutions that maintain them often move too slowly to keep up with the pace of technological advancements.
In recent years, the doors have swung open to new technologies that make clear the benefit of modernization of those systems. But despite that advancement, adoption has been slow. Only in the last year have we seen serious momentum from regulators and infrastructure providers to modernize the systems that govern our markets, from real-time everything (including settlement!) and 24/7 global trading to integrated ecosystems, stronger cybersecurity, and the use of blockchain technologies for recordkeeping - the list goes on.
Yet the truth is, most legacy systems weren’t built to handle this shift. Rearchitecting 40-year-old technology is complicated at scale. And so, many companies settle for half-measures, elongating the adoption curve of new technologies and, ultimately, stifling the pace at which innovation occurs across the market.
Vinyl Equity represents a fundamentally different approach to one of the most critical (and least modernized) components of the capital markets stack. As the official recordkeeper of public companies and the connective layer between issuers and the broader market infrastructure, this function demands precision, security and efficiency. Yet even as the rest of the ecosystem begins to evolve, transfer agents (until now) have remained stuck in the past.
The absence of innovation is what drove us to build Vinyl. We founded the company on a fundamental disconnect: the way most established transfer agents work today doesn’t reflect how capital markets actually operate.
Our Vision
From day one, our goal wasn’t to modernize around the edges, it was to rebuild the transfer agency from first principals. “Modern” doesn’t mean a sleeker UI or a few digital workflows. It means infrastructure that’s real-time, automated, compliant by design, seamlessly integrated with the ecosystem, and built to scale.
We didn’t just digitize the process. We re-architecheted how trust, transparency and accountability should work in the capital markets. Not as services layered on top but as native features of the infrastructure itself.
Core Principles
We built Vinyl on the conviction that transparency and accountability should be core system principles, not support functions. Transparency means making previously opaque processes visible: who needs to act, what the next step is, when it will be completed, and what it will cost. That visibility creates the conditions for accountability. Only when every actor understands their role in the system can you set, track, and proactively meet expectations reliably.
Execution
Before writing a single line of code, we asked ourselves: What should a transfer agent look like if it were built from scratch today? That meant understanding every job to be done, not just for shareholders and equity teams, but for the entire system of stakeholders.
Here’s what that execution looked like in practice:
1. Mapped the Entire Lifecycle of a Public Company
We studied the full journey of a company, from incorporation through early-stage funding, IPO, corporate actions like buybacks and dividends, acquisitions and mergers, even bankruptcy. Then we mapped the corresponding responsibilities and functionalities required of a transfer agent at every step.
2. Identified Every Participant in the Ecosystem
It’s not just issuers and shareholders. We mapped interactions across brokers, law firms, custodians, proxy administrators, and even regulators, every stakeholder who touches the cap table or requires updates to it. Ecosystem thinking became foundational.
3. Named and Numbered Every Workflow
Each process became a formalized unit of work. This gave us shared language across the team, and let us clearly define how workflows intersect, where handoffs happen, and which systems or actors are responsible. More importantly, it let us digitize what used to be email chains, phone calls, faxes, or PDFs, turning sequential, manual processes into asynchronous programmatic ones that completed by themselves when the necessary conditions were met.
4. Embedded Compliance as a Design Constraint
Rather than retrofitting controls, we integrated compliance checkpoints into every workflow. Our platform guides issuers and stakeholders through SEC rules automatically, with built-in prompts, constraints, alerts, and decision logging. These are not just safeguards, they’re an integral part of the product.
5. Established Information Security and Privacy Safeguards as the foundation
Legacy transfer agents were built before modern privacy expectations existed. Many still rely on disjointed tools, manual controls, and patchwork compliance and have not kept up with the industry standards for their platforms and products. That creates risk, especially when dealing with sensitive shareholder data.
Vinyl took the opposite approach. We embedded security from the outset, designing systems that meet SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA standards by default - not retrofit. Trust isn’t something we bolt on after, it’s something the architecture guarantees, now and as expectations evolve.
6. Agile Enough to Accommodate Bespoke Issuer Requirements
We architected each workflow with reusable components by clearly identifying the START and END states; a defined lifecycle; fully configurable inputs and outputs; contextualized compliance requirements. Each component can be used like a lego block for composable workflows to meet every bespoke requirement from our issuers.
Summary
We’re at the onset of a technological revolution in the capital markets infrastructure stack. Real progress requires every layer of the stack to modernize in sync, so the entire ecosystem can keep pace with what the future demands. Vinyl is purpose built to ensure that any company utilizing our infrastructure will be ready to.
Ready to see Vinyl in action?
If you're evaluating transfer agents or getting ready for public markets, our team would love to connect. Reach out to sales@vinylequity.com or visit our contact page to start a conversation.