As the office world works from home due to covid-19, news on digital solutions for digital shareholder voting seems ever more frequent. Citi’s solution Proxymity now gets fuel from a growing stakeholder group including BNY Mellon, JP Morgan and State Street.
Digital proxy voting solution Proxymity – born in 2017 within an innovation program sponsored by Citi’s Equities and Securities Services – is now leaving its nest. Adding seven other companies as investors, and setting up shop as a London-based entity, the company now starts out with 20.5 million dollars in newly raised capital.
The stakeholders are BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Computershare, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan and State Street.
According to the Proxymity press release, the platform has supported more than 3,000 shareholder meetings and has been fully launched in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Australia, and piloted in Spain.
“Taking the platform into consortium ownership means we will have unparalleled ability to scale and leverage each of our partner’s unique role in the industry,” says co-founder and chief operating officer Jonathan Smalley.
Custodians “the natural conduit”
Michaela Ludbrook, head of Securities Services at Deutsche Bank, explains why her organization is joining: “Since custodians are the natural conduit of real-time information between issuers and investors, Deutsche Bank welcomes initiatives that are designed to foster more efficient capital markets and supports tools such as Proxymity. By providing services such as a fully transparent proxy voting platform, Proxymity is one way of bringing STP to the important area of voters’ rights and the long-term stability of the companies in which these voters invest,” she is quoted.
On the topic of digital shareholder voting, the latest days have also seen the news from Euroclear Sweden that it is launching a service that enables companies to accept votes digitally from shareholders who present themselves over the country’s digital identification platform BankID.
(Illustration: Mohamed Hassan / Pixabay)