Granting RSUs to staff in Vietnam and Nigeria: is cash settlement the only practical route?

For populations this size we use cash-settled units and I no longer think of them as second class. Same grant value, same vesting, same vest-date price, paid through local payroll in local currency the month after vesting. Employees often prefer it: no foreign brokerage account and tax withheld at source.

Two things to check. The accounting is different, because cash-settled awards are remeasured each period, so your finance team needs to agree. And put a line in the plan rules allowing you to switch to share settlement later if the headcount grows to the point where registration is worth it. Our threshold is about 150 participants in a country.

In Nigeria our issue was less the plan than the exchange rate. When the naira fell sharply, the local currency value of a vest jumped, which was welcome, but the tax on it did too and people had not planned for it. Whatever you choose, explain the tax at vest clearly and early.

Small disagreement with treating cash units as equivalent. They pay out at vest, so nobody holds anything afterwards. If part of the point of the plan is that employees become shareholders, you have not achieved that. For us that mattered to the board, and we did the registration work.