Velarion Company Intelligence methodology
Velarion Company Intelligence is an independent compensation and governance data firm. This page explains exactly how our numbers are produced, so that any figure we publish can be checked against its source.
Approximately 3,000 U.S. public companies across twelve industries (banking, real estate, software, biopharma and life sciences, hardware, insurance, medical technology, utilities, asset management, gaming and lodging, payments, and specialty finance), together with the peer companies those firms disclose in their own filings. The dataset is rebuilt every night from public regulatory filings.
Our coverage emphasis is the companies that compensation consultants, investors, and board members actually benchmark against, not just the largest indices.
Every compensation and governance figure we provide originates in a public regulatory filing made by the company itself, cited by accession number (the filing's unique identifier, which we provide with every number on request). We do not use estimates, surveys, or third-party databases as inputs to those figures. Market data (share prices and total shareholder return) is used for performance context and is drawn from public market records.
Core inputs include: the summary compensation table; grant-level equity award tables; the pay ratio disclosure; say-on-pay voting results; the compensation discussion and analysis; and disclosed peer groups.
Fiscal years. For each company we use its latest disclosed fiscal year. Where a company's filing covers a transition period, we follow the company's own fiscal labeling.
Pay versus performance. Three-year comparisons use the CEO's total compensation compound annual growth rate against the company's three-year total shareholder return. Percentile ranks are computed within the company's own disclosed peer group where one exists, and within our coverage otherwise.
Pay ratios. We report the company's own disclosed CEO-to-median-employee ratio as filed. Where we rank ratios, each company appears once, at its latest disclosure.
Say-on-pay histories. We record shareholder support on the annual advisory vote each year as reported by the company, and count consecutive years below 80% support.
Performance-target disclosure census. We classify whether a company's incentive plan disclosure includes the specific performance targets that awards pay against, as distinct from disclosing that targets exist. A company is counted as non-disclosing if targets are not stated in its filing. Percentages are computed over all covered companies in the industry with a current filing on record; the denominator for each census is stated with the figure.
Special-grant identification. Where we identify awards as sign-on, retention, transition, or make-whole arrangements, these are classifications we apply, not labels from the filing. They are leads for further reporting, and we mark them as such wherever they appear.
We treat data quality as the product.
Velarion accepts no payment from covered companies for coverage, and no commercial relationship buys, delays, or previews anything we publish. Editorial operations are firewalled from commercial relationships. The firm is independently funded.
We provide data to accredited media at no charge: custom pulls, context on any covered company, and the full lists behind our published figures, typically within 24 hours. Attribution to Velarion Company Intelligence is the only condition.
Contact: Andy Richardson, founder (andy@velarion.ai)
Andrew C. Richardson, MBA, CPA, is the founder of Velarion Company Intelligence. He was CFO of four NYSE-listed companies (The Howard Hughes Corporation, Safehold Inc., iStar Inc., and NorthStar Realty Finance Corp.) and previously non-executive chairman of Alpine Income Property Trust (NYSE: PINE), which he led through its 2019 IPO. He began his career in audit at Ernst & Young and in real estate investment banking at Citigroup.