Proxymity
After winning the Best Asset Servicing Technology award at this year’s AST Industry Excellence Awards, Proxymity’s Dean Little shares the firm’s latest digital proxy voting solution, Vote Connect Global
Proxymity, known for its innovative moves in the proxy voting and shareholder disclosure arena, has disrupted the proxy voting landscape once more with its recent announcement of Vote Connect Global, a global digital proxy voting solution.
The product is available in more than 100 markets, and is set to make the lives of custodians and investors easier worldwide. Dean Little, co-founder and CEO of Proxymity, explains more.
Proxymity has been an innovative force in proxy voting since the company was established over three years ago. Now it seems you’ve gone global — can you explain the primary benefits that Vote Connect Global provides global custodians?
Vote Connect Global has been developed by combining our innovative digital platform and deep expertise in the global proxy voting space and listening to our customers and their needs.
A recent independent survey noted that the current ecosystem is costly, inefficient, and unreliable.
Our new solutions address these points to provide a better global ecosystem to ensure improved governance for all.
Key among these customer needs is a single vendor solution that delivers our trademark transparency, accuracy and security to the global proxy voting ecosystem.
By using Vote Connect Global, global custodians are able to provide their clients and institutional investors with more time. Offering the best market deadlines means clients can use this extra time to research and vote, confirm their votes were counted and self-serve via our new intuitive customer portal.
What new features does Vote Connect Global offer to benefit global custodians?
We’ve mentioned some already but to highlight a few: we now offer world-wide coverage serving over 100 markets, real-time integration with leading vote advisory agents, dynamic vote recycling that reduces rejected votes by up to 50 per cent, and a new self-service customer portal with an intuitive interface.
In addition, in response to further customer feedback, we also have added Power of Attorney management. These are just some of the important features enabling the benefits I mentioned earlier.
Why are these benefits so vital at this moment, given the current landscape of investor relations?
For global custodian shareholder clients, part of the problem has been a perceived lack of transparency.
Effective transparency is critical for both issuers and investors in order to support better engagement and overall stewardship, cornerstones of long-term responsible investments and stable economies.
The good news is that we are also seeing companies across the ecosystem actively responding to these shareholder demands, having made an unprecedented number of data disclosures to shareholders in 2023.
This responsiveness, combined with the surge in the readiness of investors to initiate proxy contests, is proving to be a key driver for issuers, custodians and investors to modernise outdated proxy voting systems, enabling a much closer level of shareholder engagement in the future.
How does Vote Connect Global assist in navigating and complying with different regulatory requirements across multiple markets?
This challenge is not new for Proxymity, we have been dealing with multiple markets and a complex regulatory environment for some time. With Vote Connect Global we used our compliance expertise and applied this to our global processes. The quality and consistency of our results bring direct and repeatable benefits to the whole ecosystem.
In essence, Vote Connect Global enables global custodians to manage large volumes of proxy voting events efficiently and ensures their timely execution. Global custodians can streamline operations, reduce risks and deliver exceptional proxy voting services. The solution, by providing real-time, accurate reconciliation of account holdings, ensures the account holders are receiving and voting on ballots with verified share positions. Vote Connect Global also handles all ballot distribution and vote collection, saving both time and money.
How easily can Proxymity’s solutions be integrated with existing systems and processes of global custodians?
Our solutions, including Vote Connect Global, are based on cloud-native architecture designed for use across the financial services industry. We have invested in the security and resilience of the platform in order for us to offer the scalability that global institutions need from their proxy voting operations. As you can imagine, every global financial institution is different, however connectivity is a core strength for Proxymity. We are trusted by major financial institutions on our third-party vendor management and cloud management frameworks, and acknowledged as leaders in integrating with legacy banking and financial infrastructure.
We deliver rapid data exchanges between banks and other players in the global ecosystem and so dealing with proprietary systems, logic and customised APIs on a regular basis is not out of the ordinary for our implementation teams.
How does Proxymity ensure the highest standards of data security and protection, particularly in the handling of sensitive voting and legal documents?
Proxymity takes security and data management very seriously and has invested significantly in developing the latest technologies to support our clients’ security requirements. In addition to the frameworks and vendor management mentioned earlier, we were also recently awarded SOC 2 accreditation for the third consecutive year. This investment is part of the reason why we are backed by seven of the top ten leading global custodians managing over US$200 trillion worth of assets under custody.
Any final thoughts on the proxy voting landscape in 2024?
Like many of our clients, we are busy getting ready for the 2024 season in the Northern hemisphere. Despite the challenges to democracy, climate change and global economic uncertainty, we remain positive that the global financial ecosystem is benefitting from the investments in connectivity and technology, and we see this welcome trend continuing.
Our mission has always been connected to bringing greater democracy and transparency, facilitating investor communications between companies and their shareholders, and we are excited by the opportunity to bring the industry closer to this goal.
