This episode of the Ticker podcast is sponsored by Broadridge Financial Services
While end-to-end vote confirmation – where investors get a receipt confirming how their proxy vote was cast – isn’t necessarily about improving the accuracy of the proxy voting process, Keir Gumbs, chief legal officer at Broadridge Financial Services, says it is about reinforcing trust.
Gumbs says 99.9 percent of the votes processed by Broadridge are accepted each season, while the firm’s services are also reviewed by external audits. But there is still a lot to be gained from offering end-to-end vote confirmation, he adds.
This year, an industry group led by the Society for Corporate Governance and the Council of Institutional Investors and including Broadridge plus representatives of custodian banks, broker-dealers, issuers, institutional investors, other proxy tabulators, transfer agents and the proxy services provider community has agreed to roll out end-to-end vote confirmation across the Fortune 500. Broadridge will further offer these vote receipts to all 2,000+ US companies whose votes it tabulates – something Gumbs describes as a ‘huge undertaking’.
Listen to the podcast recording below >
On this episode of the Ticker you’ll hear:
– How IR and corporate secretaries can smooth the way for end-to-end vote confirmation
– How end-to-end vote confirmation is going beyond nominees to the end-shareholder
– How the industry group is aiming to put protocols in place to reduce vote rejections
– How end-to-end vote confirmation might be expanded for the 2023 proxy season.
IR Magazine research
This episode of The Ticker also features findings from IR Magazine’s Crisis Communications report. You can access the research, as well as other IR Magazine reports, on the research section of our website.
