Insights | Proxymity

Riccardo Iore reflects on an outstanding 2022 for Proxymity

Last week the Financial Reporting Council issued their first ever guidance on Good Practice for Company meetings. Firstly, we at Proxymity welcome this report, and congratulate the FRC on helping to drive good governance across the industry. The report is targeted at helping companies large and small navigate the new normal world of hybrid meetings and technology driven processes.

Financial Review: A fintech spun out of Citi’s custodian banking arm says it has already set up a platform to bring much-needed transparency and speed to proxy voting, an area of the market that the ASX’s troubled distributed ledger technology CHESS replacement was meant to fix.

Happy birthday to us! Two years ago in April 2020 we announced that, after having secured a first round of strategic investment, we had spun out from Citi’s D10X incubator programme and created Proxymity Ltd supported by a global, industry-led consortium, raising over $20 m in funding.

Two years on, we are so incredibly proud of everything the team has achieved in such a short space of time.
In this article we take a look back at some of our key milestones.

Proxymity’s COO and co-founder, Jonathan Smalley, joins Global Custodian to discuss the digital proxy voting platform’s story of growth, achievements and aspirations for the future.

Proxymity held two webinars in February 2022 for Issuers about the upcoming AGM season, Kirsty Anne Jasper joined the call and listened to the panel discussions.

Australia’s meeting season runs from August to October, and this year has seen the local ecosystem led by custodians, registrars, CSD and industry groups, more ready than ever before to facilitate proactive engagement between issuers and institutional investors, through enhanced connectivity and collaboration.

In 2020, the Shareholder Rights Directive II (SRD II) was introduced across European Union member states. While implementation has presented challenges, the benefits for issuers, intermediaries and shareholders have already been apparent through the 2021 Annual General Meeting (AGM) season.

Shareholder participation has become a hot topic in recent years, as critical issues such as oversight on director’s pay, environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles, and long-term investment have taken centre stage. Investors increasingly want a say in how companies they invest in are managed. At the same time, those companies want to build closer connections with their shareholders, to better understand their needs and concerns, and act accordingly.

On April 21st, Proximus, Belgium’s leading mobile telecommunications company welcomed attendees from all over the world to their virtual 2021 Annual General Meeting, via the new LumiAGM platform. LumiAGM launched in Belgium earlier this year, extending the market leading Lumi platform beyond the live meeting to streamline the end-to-end AGM process, and providing a global gateway for retail, registered and institutional shareholders to engage with AGMs.

Voting has been a hot topic of conversation for many of us in recent times. As industry figures in Ireland gathered for a webinar to highlight proxy voting changes, the winner of the US election was still unclear – with contentious mud-slinging and claims of voter rigging being the order of the day. Although Ireland’s financial industry is far more civilized than US politics, some of the same discussion points came up with the need for a simplified voting chain with inbuilt transparency and a robust series of checks and balances meeting with universal approval.