Company Overview
Per Aarsleff A/S is one of Denmark's largest construction and civil engineering groups, listed on Nasdaq Copenhagen. The company generates annual revenue of DKK 22.6 billion, 37 percent of which comes from international operations, and employs 8,900 people across its group. Aarsleff has run a broad-based employee share purchase plan since 2018, making employee ownership a deliberate and long-standing part of how the company invests in its people. It is the kind of company where ownership culture has to reach people on a construction site, not just in a boardroom.
The Challenge
Keeping a Mature, High-Participation Programme Running Smoothly, and Moving It to a New Platform Under Time Pressure
By 2024, Aarsleff's employee share programme had been running for six years and had grown steadily year on year. Nearly 2,000 employees were participating annually. The matching mechanism, where the company gives every participant the same number of shares they purchased after a three-year vesting period, had been in place since the beginning. Participation had more than doubled since launch.
But beneath those numbers, the administration was carrying friction. The programme ran on a platform that had not kept pace with what a programme of this size and maturity needed.
"In general, we spent far too much time administering the programme, and identifying and correcting errors in particular was a real time drain."
Jeppe Risum Sørensen, Group Finance Manager, Per Aarsleff A/S
Three specific problems stood out.
Fractional shares left loose ends in the system. When employees left the company, they could exit with a fraction of a share sitting in their account. That fraction had to go somewhere, and following it up created administrative work that served no one. It was a small problem per occurrence, but it accumulated.
Participants could not get help in Danish. For a programme that reached employees across construction sites, warehouses, and offices, being able to call or email with a question in your own language is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a participant who understands what they own and one who disengages because the process feels foreign.
Communication was reactive and sparse. Participants received limited proactive information about enrolment windows, dividend payouts, and vesting events. When something was happening in the programme, employees found out too late or not at all.
Response times slowed everything down. Administrative questions took too long to resolve. That applied both to the team running the programme internally and to participants trying to get answers about their own accounts.
The decision to move to Optio was made in November 2024. What followed was not a clean, straightforward migration.
When the demigration process extended beyond the original timeline, Optio stepped up its involvement, working closely and hands-on with Aarsleff throughout the second half of 2025 to ensure nothing was lost in the transition. The platform went live just before Christmas 2025, putting Aarsleff on the new system in time for the 2026 ESPP enrolment window.
That left roughly one to one and a half months between go-live and the opening of the 2026 ESPP enrolment window.
"The migration of the programme proved more difficult than expected due to administrative and compliance-related challenges with our previous provider. However, Optio was excellent at stepping up and managing the process so that everything was completed on time. And although, ideally, we would have liked more time for testing and similar activities, we were never in any doubt that the setup worked and that we would get across the finish line."
Jeppe Risum Sørensen, Group Finance Manager
The Solution
Danish-Language Support, Cleaner Administration, and a Platform Ready for Its First Live Enrolment Window
Optio delivered a complete migration for a programme with close to 2,000 established participants and years of history, with the system, communication, and participant support all ready for the first enrolment window within weeks of go-live.
Proactive communication built into the platform. Optio supported Aarsleff with more frequent and structured communication to participants, including platform banners, push notifications, and email sequences tied to key programme events. Participants now receive timely information ahead of enrolment windows, matching events, and dividend payouts. Clearer communication has contributed to strong early engagement with the ESPP, giving employees better visibility into what they need to do and when.
Participant support in Danish, by phone and email. Where communication prepared participants for what was coming, Danish-language support ensured they could get help when they needed it. Optio provides participant support in Danish across both channels. For a workforce that spans office environments and active construction sites, a field worker with a question about their shares should not have to navigate a foreign language or a generic helpdesk to get an answer. This local-language support creates a more accessible and reassuring participant experience, especially for employees who may not be familiar with share plans or equity-related processes. Questions about dividends, share transfers, selling, and plan mechanics are now handled directly in Danish.
Fractional shares removed. The same attention extended to the programme's administrative structure. Optio eliminated fractional shares from the programme structure entirely. Participants now hold whole shares only. The practical effect: no more residual balances when employees leave, no administrative follow-up, no unresolved positions sitting in the system. The participant journey became cleaner, and the administrative overhead of chasing down fractions disappeared.
Faster response times across the board. Alongside cleaner administration, Optio's response times, for both internal administration and participant-facing support, help reduce uncertainty for participants and make day-to-day plan administration more efficient. Questions get answered, issues get resolved, and the team running the programme can move forward without waiting.
A full-service scope covering the programme end to end. These improvements sit across a full-service scope. Optio supports Aarsleff across all recurring plan activities:
- Annual ESPP administration
- Annual dividend payout
- Annual matching process
- Quarterly IFRS reporting
- Annual Danish tax reporting
- Mobile app access for participants
- Nominee transfers and selling (rolling basis)
In April 2026, Optio visited Aarsleff for an in-person workshop. The purpose was to go through existing processes, identify improvement opportunities, and strengthen the collaboration. It reflects the ongoing nature of the partnership: Optio is not only a system provider but a sparring partner in helping Aarsleff improve the administration and participant experience around their employee share programmes.
"The workshop confirmed the impression we already had: that Optio is a partner that is skilled at identifying the customer's needs and goes to great lengths to adapt to them. Good solutions were found for the small issues that created friction, and overall the collaboration simply works extremely well."
Jeppe Risum Sørensen, Group Finance Manager
"Overall, we experience Optio as highly approachable and solution-oriented. No problem is too big or too small, and every enquiry is handled quickly and seriously. In particular, the support provided to employees has been a huge improvement for us and has significantly reduced the number of enquiries to our internal team, while also creating much greater satisfaction with the programme among participants.
All in all, we have achieved almost everything we hoped for when we decided to change provider."
The Result
A New Record: 2,300 Participants and DKK 50 Million Invested, Weeks After Go-Live
The 2026 ESPP enrolment produced the highest participation in the programme's history. That record arrived just weeks after the platform migration was completed.
- 2,300 participants, up 10 percent in 2026. Nearly 2,300 employees chose to buy shares in the 2026 programme, a new record and a 10 percent increase on 2025, which had itself been a record year. This growth came in the first full enrolment window after go-live, when participants had been using the Optio system for approximately one to one and a half months. The result points to a strong onboarding experience, clear participant communication, and a platform employees were able to understand and engage with quickly.
- DKK 50 million invested in 2026 alone. The total employee investment in the 2026 programme exceeded DKK 50 million, reflecting not just participation numbers but the depth of individual commitment.
- 90 percent of participants hold through vesting. Approximately 90 percent of participants retain their shares through the three-year custody period, satisfying the condition that triggers the company match. That retention rate has held consistently across programme years.
- 5 percent of share capital now employee-owned. Since the programme launched, employee ownership has grown to approximately 5 percent of Aarsleff's total share capital. From the first year through 2023, Aarsleff awarded close to 700,000 matching shares.
- Individual returns that compound over time. An employee who has invested DKK 15,000 per year since 2018 has put in DKK 135,000 in total. Based on the current share price, that shareholding is worth approximately DKK 600,000 today, before dividends.
When an employee joins an ESPP, they are making a financial commitment. They are agreeing to lock up a portion of their savings for three years. In a practical sense, they are voting on whether they trust the company's direction and their own future with it. At Aarsleff, 2,300 employees made that vote in 2026.
"This says something about the culture we have at Aarsleff, and the mutual trust, where both employees and the company invest in each other."
Jeppe Risum Sørensen, Group Finance Manager
Why Aarsleff Offers Equity
Aarsleff's employee share programme is not a benefit that sits in an HR handbook. It is a structural expression of how the company sees the relationship between its people and its performance.
The matching mechanism is a commitment the company makes to every participant who stays. It is not a bonus. It is a matched investment. The company is asking employees to believe in its future, and it is putting shares on the table to demonstrate its own belief in theirs.
The three-year holding period means participants have to make a genuine decision: am I staying? For Aarsleff, a company that builds multi-year infrastructure projects and employs people across complex technical disciplines, that question has a real answer. The 90 percent vesting retention rate suggests most participants give the same one.
"Employee ownership isn't a perk. It's a strategy."
Jeppe Risum Sørensen, Group Finance Manager, Per Aarsleff A/S
