For mid-sized listed companies, the Long-Term Incentive Plan is both a critical leadership tool and an administrative burden. Bilfinger SE, the Mannheim-based industrial services group with around 31,000 employees, has resolved that contradiction. What emerged is more than an efficiency story.
We sat down with Ian Karcher, Global Head of Compensation & Benefits at Bilfinger, for a deeper dive on modernising their LTIP, choosing Optio, building visibility for impact, and his advice for his Compensation & Benefits peers.
The Bilfinger Long-Term Incentive Plan, the BLTIP, targets the company's most senior leadership. Between 90 and 120 executives participate each year, selected by the board through a structured evaluation process. The plan is tied to three separate performance criteria, including Total Shareholder Return measured against a defined peer group.
Until recently, all IFRS reporting ran through manually maintained Excel files, managed by the accounting team alongside its regular responsibilities. The consequences: time lags, data inconsistencies, and significant coordination overhead between Compensation & Benefits and group finance. Karcher does not soften it.
"Our accounting department was doing this on the side. There were always questions, always delays. And ultimately, it's not really C&B's job to understand accounting rules in depth."
Simultaneously, participants had almost no visibility into their plans. They knew what had been granted, but not what their awards were worth today, and not how performance was tracking. The result was a constant flow of inbound queries to HR, and a programme that, despite its financial significance, rarely commanded the attention of its recipients.
Karcher warns explicitly against letting brand recognition drive provider selection.
"A lot of companies go with big names because it gives you the illusion of safety and stability. But that's not the right approach. You should look at the effectiveness of the product, the software, the service, the whole picture."
His suspicion goes further: some larger providers are less interested in running programmes well than in the participant data itself, as a route to selling additional financial services. Bilfinger's previous provider had handled the basics, but the platform had stagnated, pricing was high, and the sense of being a strategically important client had faded.
"We felt a bit like a cash cow."
At Optio Incentives, Karcher found an easy-to-use platform, responsive customer service, and an integrated package covering tax, legal and accounting support, alongside a genuine understanding of what it means to serve a listed company with a lean team. "I wanted someone who understands that we rely on their expertise and their software, and that both need to work without friction."
The first tranche of the BLTIP went live on Optio in July 2025, all data jointly validated. Since then, grants, IFRS reporting, performance tracking, participant communications, the employee portal, and the Employee Share Purchase Programme all run through a single system. For the group accounting function, this means reports on demand, without routing through C&B.
"Before, there was a lot of manual work in the background that nobody saw, but which consumed significant time. And simply finding data is one of the least value-creating activities imaginable."
Optio also now generates the annual participant letters automatically, a task that had previously been handled on an ad hoc basis, dependent on who had capacity at the time. The result is a single source of truth: any question about the BLTIP is resolved by going directly to Optio, without routing through HR or reconciling against a secondary spreadsheet.
Karcher's central conviction: an incentive programme that does not genuinely reach its participants has failed its purpose. He illustrates this with an experience from an earlier point in his career.
"At a previous employer, executives would call me and say: I've got 50,000 or 100,000 euros in my account. Do you know where it came from? And I had to explain: that's your Long-Term Incentive, it just vested. Oh, thanks. And then they hung up."
The financial mechanism had worked. The motivational one had not.
This is precisely what the Market Performance Tracker is designed to deliver. Bilfinger was the first Optio client to use it: a feature that shows participants in real time how Bilfinger's Total Shareholder Return ranks against 15 defined peer companies, updated daily, with an automatic projection of their likely payout. It is, as Karcher describes it, like checking an investment account: you look at it regularly because it builds an active relationship with your portfolio.
"The connection has to be established: what I see here online has a direct impact on my daily work. You only achieve that through visualisation."
Asked what he would recommend to peers, Karcher is direct: start with the data. Anyone onboarding a new provider must have clean processes and a reliable data foundation before any system goes live. Equally important is event management: how smoothly the platform handles vesting events, grants, and payouts. That is where a provider's real capabilities become visible.
Beyond that, he urges companies to match their provider choice to their actual team size and internal capacity. At Bilfinger, two people at group headquarters, supported by a part-time process manager, run the entire LTIP programme. A team that lean demands a partner who absorbs the workload, not one who adds to it. Karcher puts it plainly: "Optio keeps the work away. That sounds trivial, but that is exactly what matters."
Looking further ahead, he sees the future of compensation and benefits teams clearly.
"There will be fewer and fewer people working in these departments. There will be people with a lot of experience, and the rest will be automated."
Bilfinger is already looking ahead: app-based access, an experience closer to a digital investment account, and a possible extension of the programme to additional leadership levels. The structured grading methodology being developed in preparation for the EU Pay Transparency Directive may serve as a foundation for broadened eligibility criteria.
What Bilfinger has achieved represents a relevant reference point for many mid-sized listed companies in Germany: a genuinely complex LTIP, a lean team, and growing regulatory and participant expectations. Choosing the right provider is not a formality: it determines whether a programme actually works. Or whether executives one day call to ask where a six-figure sum in their account came from.
Original article in Deutsch published in the Mitarbeiterbeteiligung 2026 magazine by goingpublic.de