I'm sure there's variables, but your company will most likely setup something with a brokerage and then you'll have to create an account there and have an employer equity account which will track your options. When you exercise them, the shares will go into your regular brokerage account and you can trade them like anything else (potentially subject to trading windows and other temporal conditions). Once you've got shares, you can transfer them out to a different brokerage if you like paperwork.

Hopefully at a decent brokerage like e-trade or fidelity or schwab or even whatever Merril Lynch is called these days, and not ComputerShare, which is terrible.

Thanks. I was under the impression that until my options became stocks, my interface would be some person in the finance department. If my options appear in some managed brokerage account of mine, that makes this a lot more transparent.

Eventually, it should be in a managed account. But it may take a while post IPO to set it up. It depends how much experience the finance department has, but the brokerages know how to do it.

This document was very helpful to me https://docdro.id/ZtXxCNd