Equiniti Brand Guidelines: Lloyds TSB Registrars, the EQ Name & a Pending Bullish Deal

A bank’s share register becomes a company.

Equiniti began inside a bank. English Wikipedia says the business was originally Lloyds TSB Registrars, a subsidiary of Lloyds Bank that kept share registers for listed companies: the record of who holds a company’s shares and who is paid its dividends. In October 2007 the private equity firm Advent International acquired the business, and it traded from then on as Equiniti. The company’s own timeline puts the same step in one line: in 2007, it says, Equiniti was “carved out of Lloyds TSB Group.”

The new company soon grew beyond registration. Its timeline says pensions and remediation capabilities were acquired in 2010, and English Wikipedia records an office in Chennai, India, opened in 2014, with a second office in Bengaluru in 2019. In October 2015 Equiniti became a public company through an initial public offering in London, according to the same Wikipedia article, which cites the Telegraph and City A.M. In July 2017 it acquired the share registration business of Wells Fargo in the United States, Wikipedia says, citing the Financial Times.

Wikipedia describes the company today as Equiniti Group Limited, a provider of stock transfer agent and pension administration services, with its primary office in West Sussex. The company’s website says it handles large corporate actions for its clients and supports new companies making their debut as listed businesses, alongside its work on share plans and on payments to pensioners and annuitants.

From Equiniti to EQ.

The visible identity changed in June 2020. Finance Magnates reported on 22 June 2020 that Equiniti was “becoming EQ,” a shorter label for marketing, while the company’s legal name would remain Equiniti Group plc. The new label, the report said, aligned the company’s branding with its core divisions, EQ Paymaster, EQ Boardroom and EQ Digital, alongside its American division, EQ U.S. English Wikipedia also dates the rebrand to “EQ,” for marketing purposes, to June 2020. In the same announcement the company described EQ as providing “accessible digital services for regulated markets,” with a focus on equity and investment products, pensions, payments and regulatory technology.

At the time the company said it served more than 3,000 companies and, through them, more than 30 million shareholders, investors and pensioners, and that it carried out administration and payment services for about 70 of the FTSE 100, Finance Magnates reported. The group chief executive presented the change as a statement of purpose, launched together with a programme for vulnerable customers and a supplier code of conduct; the report quotes him saying the new brand stood for the simplicity of the company’s operations, the quality of its service and its growing digitisation.

The two letters now carry most of the work. The company’s website calls the business EQ throughout and describes its UK share registration arm in its own figures: it says it acts as share registrar for 48% of the FTSE 100, holds 9.2 million shareholder records and looks after 1.1 million share plan participants. Its Retirement Solutions business, the same page says, supports more than 13 million pension scheme members on its platforms. Those are the company’s own numbers, given here as its claims.

The website names its UK businesses in the same short style, with Retirement Solutions and Customer Resolutions alongside share registration, and it describes Customer Resolutions as improving regulated customer service and complaints operations through consultancy, resourcing, technology and insights. The longer name survives in corporate settings: the site keeps a page for Equiniti Group debt investors and a section of statutory and regulatory reports.

Registers, portals and annual reports.

Fund administrators, trust companies and share registrars do much of their work out of sight. They keep the registers of who owns a company’s shares, run employee share plans, calculate fund values, act as trustees and file the paperwork that keeps funds and companies in good standing. Most people meet them only through a dividend statement, a voting form or a login page, so their identities have to work as hard on a plain document as on a home page.

The visual language of the category is restrained. Wordmarks tend towards navy, teal and purple rather than bright colours, often paired with a clean sans. Computershare goes further than most in making a colour part of its culture: it describes its ways of working as “Being Purple.” Others take on a parent’s mark; Link Group became MUFG Pension & Market Services after its Japanese buyer completed the takeover in May 2024.

The websites follow a familiar pattern. There is usually a country or office list — for the fund and trust firms, one that often runs across Jersey, Guernsey, Luxembourg, Ireland and the Caribbean — a row of investor and client portal logins, and separate pages for fund, corporate and private-client services. Because these businesses are regulated, the same sites carry lists of licences and regulators, from the Financial Conduct Authority in Britain to the authorities of the Channel Islands and the Cayman Islands, along with annual reports for those that are listed.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, who has owned it and what it has been called — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word. Several have changed hands or names in recent years, and those changes are given with their dates.

Siris, AST and a pending sale.

Equiniti left the stock market in 2021. English Wikipedia says Siris Capital acquired the company in December 2021 and merged it with American Stock Transfer & Trust Company (AST). A press release from the software group SS&C Technologies, dated 21 December 2021, announced a minority investment in a newly incorporated company formed by combining Equiniti and AST, both recently acquired by affiliates of Siris; an SS&C executive joined the board of the combined company. The release describes SS&C as a provider of services and software founded in 1986 and based in Windsor, Connecticut. Equiniti’s own timeline adds that in 2023 Equiniti and AST merged into a single Equiniti Trust Company, LLC in the United States.

A further change of owner has been agreed but not completed. English Wikipedia says that in May 2026 the cryptocurrency exchange Bullish agreed to acquire Equiniti from Siris Capital, citing CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. The deal was agreed in May 2026 and had not completed at the time of writing, so Equiniti is described here under its current owner. The company’s website names Dan Kramer as its chief executive officer.

For a design guide, Equiniti shows how a registrar can shorten its public name to two letters while the long legal name carries on in the paperwork. Compare Computershare, another share registrar, and MUFG Pension & Market Services, the former Link Group. For this guide we use a deep navy, a teal and a soft violet with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Equiniti’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.