VSM Service Providers Enhance Platforms To Improve Access For Street-Name Holders

Good news: The top-four VSM service providers - Broadridge, Computershare, EQ and Mediant - worked together as a sub-committee of the “End-to-End Vote Confirmation Committee” - and, as we’d predicted they would, they have come up with ways to make it easier and surer for shareholders who keep their shares in “street-name” to attend VSMs hosted by providers other than Broadridge - and to cast their votes online this season if they so desire, via new “APIs” or “Application Program Interfaces.”

The Broadridge API generates a “Digital Legal Proxy” to street-name holders who wish to attend a meeting hosted by a non-Broadridge provider - and to vote online if they so desire - which will be immediately recognized as valid at VSM voting sites other than Broadridge’s own. Currently, Computershare, EQ and Mediant are now able to recognize the control numbers right off the bat. 

Mediant - which provides vote processing services to brokers that are similar to Broadridge’s - and also “hosts” VSMs on behalf of public-company clients who hire them for meeting-management services - has two features we like a lot: First, they allow street-name holders to be recorded as having “voted in person.” Broadridge’s Digital Proxy (unlike the paper document we had become used to seeing) is designed, at the behest of its broker clients, to safeguard the identity of the owners from outside scrutiny. So votes via the Broadridge API platform are voted by Broadridge and reported as “broker votes” - since the brokers are considered the “holders of record.” Another nice feature of the Mediant model; unlike the Broadridge model - that revokes any earlier votes when the Digital Legal Proxy is issued, and then permits voting ONLY at the VSM - is that voters who may attend but decide not to vote  at a Mediant-hosted meeting - or who fail to attend at all - will not have any earlier votes revoked. The mechanical aspects of the Broadridge model are still under study with 2022 in mind, according to the sub-committee report.

For avid proxy-industry watchers, it will be interesting to see if Broadridge will continue to expand its enormous share of retail-voter tabulation for both street-name and registered holders this season - which so far this year it seems to be doing - or if the new APIs can stem or even reverse the tide a bit.  Broadridge’s new venture with Q4 (see On the Supplier Scene section in this issue) may pose a bigger challenge than ever to smaller competitors this season.

One thing seems sure, however: Publicly traded companies will be seeing a lot more of Mediant this season, since they handle the proxy voting for Robinhood’s newly-gigantic base of retail investor clients.