Euroclear France and Broadridge Financial Solutions are launching an automated service to notify domestic and foreign institutional investors holding shares in NYSE Euronext Paris-listed companies of upcoming annual and extraordinary general meetings. The service, to be launched on March 25 2013, will provide investors in listed companies with a central conduit through which to automatically receive meeting notifications.
This automated service will comply with the recommendations of the European Market Standards for General Meetings aimed at facilitating efficient and automated voting processes. This includes the distribution of corporate event information for shareholders wherever they are located. Euroclear France and Broadridge will collect relevant shareholder information from a number of sources: the Bulletin des Annonces Lgales Obligatoires (BALO), issuers and foreign central securities depositories (CSDs). They will then provide investors with updated general and extraordinary meeting information, via email or ISO compliant messaging, covering all 760 companies listed on NYSE Euronext Paris.
Patricia Rosch, president, Investor Communication Solutions, International, at Broadridge said: Broadridge sees this collaboration with Euroclear France as another major step forward in our efforts to increase the straight-through processing (STP) and overall automation of the proxy process globally, in line with the goals of not only the EU Shareholder Rights Directive, but also supporting compliance with the Market Standards for General Meetings. We look forward to extending the same benefits of this cooperation to the other ESES markets as soon as possible.
Euroclear France is the first of the three ESES CSDs to automate company meeting notifications. The second stage of the service vote automation will be delivered separately in France, at a later stage, and in cooperation with VOTACCESS the electronic platform appointed by AFTI to collect shareholder voting instructions before annual and extraordinary general meetings in France. The remaining ESES CSDs Euroclear Belgium and Euroclear Nederland will also launch automated meeting notification and voting services in their respective markets later this year.
(JDC)