Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:BR) today announced significant expansion of its Direct Market Solutions (DMS), a custodian focused local market “golden copy” event sourcing and vote execution service extension to Broadridge’s leading Global Proxy solution.

The innovation in DMS services is across three areas:

• Grows coverage to 20 key markets in 2021 (which represents the significant majority of client holdings and ~50% of global meetings) with more markets to follow in 2022 and 2023. This complements Broadridge’s existing leading voting solutions that already provide 100% coverage across 100+ markets.
• Improves market deadlines and extends voting windows by up to three days, allowing investors more time to make their elections.
• Reduces costs to custodians due to Broadridge’s ability to mutualise event sourcing and execution across the industry, and pass those savings to participating clients.

DMS enables issuer market “golden copy” meeting information to be communicated to investors on the day of the meeting announcement, where required. It also extends the voting window by up to 3 days for investors by removing market inefficiencies in the traditional voting process, allowing votes to be placed directly from the investor to the issuer or its agent in these markets.

Demi Derem, GM, International Investor Communication Solutions at Broadridge, comments:

“Today’s announcement is part of our ongoing innovation to enable higher standards of corporate governance and investor stewardship. Broadridge has long advocated and invested in more efficient and innovative local market models through its DMS service launched in 2015.

Shareholder Rights Directive II (SRD II) obligated European issuers to provide the market with “golden copy” machine readable issuer meeting information. Since SRD II was put into effect in September 2020, we have completed over 300 new retail and institutional client implementations and processed over 89,000 meetings for clients that trust in our global proxy credentials and ability to continually drive the market forward for the benefit of all participants.”

DMS markets covered in 2021 include Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK and US.