As voting policies become more nuanced and stewardship expectations keep rising, what are global custodians and institutional investors now looking for in a proxy policy management framework?
This is an area where we are investing heavily and seeing significant market demand globally. Three themes are defining what clients want from a proxy policy framework right now.
The first is flexibility and neutrality. Asset managers and the broader buy-side do not want to be perceived as following someone else’s recommendations. They want to work with a provider that has no house view, no bias in either direction, and that delivers solutions which are data-driven and fully configurable to their own structures. Whether portfolio managers are directly involved in voting decisions, or different teams carry responsibility across regions, the framework has to adapt to that complexity.
Swatika Rajaram
The second is operational efficiency. Regulatory regimes are diverging, focus areas are diverging, and yet an asset manager has to function as a seamless global unit. That is only possible if you automate the manual work, streamline workflows, and make policy outputs available well in advance of meetings, giving clients time not just to review policy, but to interrogate the underlying data and truly understand what they are voting on.
The third is accuracy and objectivity. Clients want issuer data that is 100% accurate and available far enough ahead of the meeting that there is room for genuine analysis. We are helping clients navigate that wealth of data through tools like an AI chatbot, which makes it far more accessible in practice.
What does true global proxy coverage look like in practice, particularly when custodians need consistency across markets, sub-custodians and event types?
We cover clients across 127 markets and 350-plus sub-custodians, working with more than a thousand global organisations, from global custodians to large digital brokers. But for us, true global coverage is not just a map. It means that the quality, resiliency and scalability of the service we bring to large markets like the US, the UK, Australia and Japan is the same quality we bring to every single market, while still being able to customise our approach because every market is different. Regulators differ, voting deadlines differ, local nuances differ.
Beyond that, best-in-class connectivity with sub-custodians – whether they are large international players or very local, market-specific custodians – has to hold up in peak periods and times of market stress.
Global proxy is a team effort. For any one proxy event to go off smoothly, it involves us, the global custodians, the sub-custodians and the issuer agents. Everyone has to work well together.
In a market where providers often sound similar, what should global custodians look for when deciding which proxy partner can truly support them through regulatory change, digital transformation and operational risk?
We have won over 70 RFPs in the last two years, and in every single one, custodians and digital brokers looked well beyond feature comparisons and slide-deck checkboxes. What they evaluated was track record, depth of regulatory relationships, investment in digital connectivity, info security and scale.
Experience in this business genuinely matters. We bring more than 30 years in proxy, both in the US and globally, with strong client retention and long-standing trusted relationships. Scale also drives operational resiliency, the breadth of our sub-custodian connectivity, the volume of organisations we work with, and our balance sheet all give us the capacity to invest in staying ahead of regulatory change and industry trends.
Two areas I would particularly highlight are tokenisation and cybersecurity. In today’s environment, the whole ecosystem is only as strong as its weakest link. The amount we are investing in information security to ensure that any data coming into our environment is protected is substantial. That may not be the most headline-grabbing topic, but it is exactly what custodians are prioritising behind closed doors.
When global custodians think about governance challenges today – from voting oversight to policy implementation to class actions recovery – where can the right solutions make the greatest impact?
The biggest impact comes in areas where governance demands are rising but operational complexity remains very high. For custodians, that means proxy voting oversight, class actions recovery and broader asset servicing.
On the proxy side, custodians need transparency, strong market expertise and the ability to enable their institutional clients to access the right custom policy and stewardship solutions. On class actions, the opportunity is significant, too many clients are leaving millions of dollars on the table simply because the administrative burden of pursuing recovery is too high. Custodians have a real enabling role to play in changing that, and the right technology can make pursuing recovery opportunities far more efficient and effective.
These are the areas where the gap between operational complexity and governance expectation is widest, and where focused investment in the right solutions can deliver the most meaningful results.
Broadridge recently announced it has extended its proxy voting and disclosure capabilities to support all models of tokenised securities. Can you expand on the role Broadridge is taking when it comes to tokenised securities and the relevance for global custodians?
This is an area we are very excited about and where we are making significant investments. Put simply, we are extending our proxy infrastructure to support all forms of tokenisation — the issuer-sponsored model, the synthetic model and the custodial model — in the U.S. and globally, so that we can support corporate governance across all three.
What that means in practice for custodians is a single pane of glass. Rather than operating two parallel models – one for traditional securities and one for tokenised securities – custodians and their clients can access a unified experience. Consider an investor (institutional or retail) who holds Tesla in its traditional form and wants to acquire a tokenised Tesla security. They should not have to navigate two separate voting experiences. Bringing that together coherently is fundamental.
Equally important is ensuring that all the traditional guardrails around proxy voting carry across to tokenised securities: entitlement reconciliation, ensuring no one is over-boarding, confirming access to the right materials, collecting votes and issuing vote confirmations. The governance rigour that exists for traditional proxy must exist here too.
We recently went live with Galaxy, who issued the first native tokenised securities in their own equity, that is now live and on-chain. We have also announced a partnership with Ondo Finance around the synthetic model and custodial model, and further announcements are coming. All of this is driven by client demand, but it has also been underpinned by more than two years of investment and preparation on our side. The goal is to be the trusted governance layer that brings institutional-grade proxy, disclosure and communications capabilities into these tokenised markets.