Alianza's CLO Closes His Equity Blind Spots Across 27 Countries with Slice

The challenge: Acquiring MetaSwitch from Microsoft took Alianza global almost overnight, and its equity program needed a platform built for that international scope and ready to grow with it.

The solution: Slice's real-time global compliance engine and SliceAI, backed by a team that works as a true partner.

The result: Compliance issues now surface as awards are granted, not after, and equity questions that used to take hours are answered quickly.

Garner Meads, Chief Legal Officer at Alianza, has spent about a decade in equity, managing multiple concurrent plans through mergers at two portfolio companies.

Alianza, a telecommunications infrastructure and technology company headquartered in Pleasant Grove, Utah, handed him something new: employees and contractors in 27 countries. “This was the first time in my career where we really had an international employee footprint,” he says.

Going Global: An Equity Program Ready to Scale

When Alianza acquired MetaSwitch, a division of Microsoft, it brought on a couple hundred employees across the UK, plus employees and contractors in quite a few other countries. “We kind of got catapulted into that stratosphere,” Garner says.

Equity compensation had to follow. Alianza's team developed country-specific riders and worked with specialized outside counsel to define what each jurisdiction required. Running the program day to day at that scale called for a platform with international compliance built in.

Scoping those requirements alone was a significant undertaking.

“I probably spent close to 100 hours of outside counsel time just scoping what we needed to put in place for some of those international jurisdictions,” Garner says.

The moment to choose

As a multi-year renewal with its prior platform approached, Alianza looked for an equity partner that could support its international program today and scale with it going forward.

The Decision: Compliance That Works as Awards Are Granted, and AI That Does Real Work

Garner knew the big-name equity platforms from his public company and pre-IPO years, and looked at them again. “It was just a slight variation on what I'd already seen and worked with at other companies,” he says. Two things in Slice's demos were new to him.

Compliance that doesn't wait to be run

With Slice, every award is checked against local requirements as it's uploaded, and potential issues are flagged and categorized red, yellow or green.

“The international compliance feature, I'd never seen that before,” Garner says. “Especially the real-time flagging of potential and recognized compliance issues.”

An AI layer that goes deeper than expected

He expected SliceAI to handle high-level questions. It did more.

“It was a lot better than I was expecting,” Garner says. “I was really impressed with how detailed the work the AI can do for you is.”

The Results: Fewer Blind Spots, Faster Answers, and a True Partner

Compliance issues surface before they become problems

For a chief legal officer, the risk that matters most is the one nobody has spotted yet. “As a chief legal officer, I'm always worried about what I don't know,” Garner says.

Now, when Alianza grants an award to someone in Brazil, Ukraine, Belgium or the UK, Slice flags what needs attention as it happens. It doesn't make every compliance question disappear, but the ones that need his attention reach him sooner. “It's always harder to go back and fix things as opposed to doing them right in the moment,” he explains.

“The real time compliance monitoring makes sure you're doing it right. Not after the fact, but literally in real time. It just makes me sleep a little easier at night,” said Garner Meads, Chief Legal Officer at Alianza.

Accurate answers for a large stakeholder base

Alianza's stakeholder base ranges from people holding 100 shares to holders of a significant percentage of the company, and they all have questions. Instead of learning a report builder and rerunning reports until every box is right, Garner asks SliceAI.

“I can type it into Slice, let it work in the background, and it generates a spreadsheet or report I didn't have to put together,” he says.

Speed doesn't replace diligence. His team still checks the work against its own understanding before it's used.

Shareholder approvals, mapped in minutes

Alianza's cap table includes preferred and common shareholders. When Garner needs a supermajority vote, he runs a report and sees exactly whose approval he needs.

“Every time I can get an answer quickly that historically would have taken a lot longer and much more effort,” he says, “that's when I think, okay, we made the right move and this is super helpful.”

“A partner in the trenches”

For Garner, what sets Slice apart is the team. “Somebody's going to pick up the phone, get in the trenches with you, and pick up a shovel if needed, and start moving earth,” he says. Gal, Alianza's main point of contact at Slice, worked one-on-one with Alianza's legal ops team to make the migration smooth, and has stayed close since, offering personalized help with questions specific to Alianza and championing its feature requests.

“Gal was super helpful,” Garner says. “That was great, just to work one-on-one.”

Built around Alianza's needs

Slice takes Alianza's feedback straight into the product. When Alianza wanted certain features visible to its stakeholders, and a modeling tool that could run scenarios on its unique waterfall, the Slice team was willing to “go back and say, okay, let us take that to our team and see if we can reconfigure this so that it meets your needs.”

“If I say I'd really like to be able to do this and the answer is no, we can't, that's not our experience with Slice,” Garner says. “With Slice it's, let's take a look at that.”

As he puts it: “What we've really got here is a partner in helping us manage our equity compensation and cap table across the company.”

His advice to other legal and finance leaders is simple.

“If you have employees in multiple countries, to me it's a no-brainer,” said Garner Meads, Chief Legal Officer at Alianza.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does Slice help legal teams manage equity compliance across countries? Slice checks every award against local requirements as it's uploaded and flags issues by risk level. Its compliance engine covers 67+ countries and is maintained by in-house legal and tax specialists, so legal teams see what needs attention before it becomes a problem.

Q: Does Slice cover countries like the UK, Brazil, Ukraine and Belgium? Yes. Slice covers 67+ countries, including the ones where Alianza grants awards. Plans are configured per country and per equity type, so each grant is checked against the rules that apply to the person receiving it.

Q: Can Slice reduce how much we rely on outside counsel for equity questions? It can reduce it for many routine, country-specific questions. Slice's built-in compliance guidance and SliceAI let teams answer those on their own, and bring outside counsel in for the questions that truly need them.

Q: Is SliceAI reliable enough for legal work? SliceAI answers with inline citations from Slice's own legal knowledge base, so every answer can be checked. It operates inside the same permissions model as the rest of Slice and only sees the data the person asking is entitled to see. As Alianza does, keeping a human in the loop for final review is good practice.

Q: Can Slice handle a complex cap table with multiple preference tiers? Yes. Slice lets teams cut cap table data by shareholder class and use SliceAI on top of it, making a complicated landscape easier to understand and act on, from shareholder approvals to scenario modeling.

Q: What does support look like after onboarding? Every customer gets a named contact and a dedicated channel with Slice's compliance and customer success team, alongside in-product AI guidance for immediate answers.