Broadridge Financial Solutions has collaborated with SLIB, a French-based vendor of electronic voting and security services, to offer a joint, cross-border proxy voting solution for Shareholder Rights Directive II (SRD II) compliance, covering European shareholder meetings.
Designed specifically for French intermediaries, the fully automated, end-to-end solution will bring together Broadridge’s Global Proxy solution and SLIB’s Votaccess electronic voting platform through an STP connection.
Broadridge’s infrastructure underpins proxy voting services for over half of public companies and mutual funds globally, and processes on average more than US$10 trillion in fixed income and equity securities trades per day, while Votaccess currently manages over 80% of CAC 40 company general meetings.
The alliance will enable the distribution of meeting agendas for European shareholder meetings, as well as process and count votes from French shareholders. The solution will also allow French retail intermediaries to offer proactive proxy voting services to shareholders. The solution will be available ahead of the 2021 proxy season, the first for which SRD II compliance will be compulsory.
SRD II went live on 4 September 2020 and is global in scope, impacting any financial intermediary that holds or services European equities, irrespective of where the intermediary firm is located. It applies to all types of financial intermediaries, including banks and brokers, wealth managers and central securities depositories (CSDs).
“In an investor communications environment that has been dominated by heavily manual processes, this collaboration will help the French market realise significant efficiencies when it comes to vote processing across European shareholder meetings, and take the lead when it comes to compliance with SRD II,” said Demi Derem, general manager of Broadridge’s international investor communication solutions.
The tie up with SLIB follows the announcement in December that Broadridge had been selected by Danish full-service technology firm BEC to provide its solution for global proxy management for retail shareholders and shareholder disclosure.