Deutsche Bank has gone live with its digital proxy voting service Proxymity.
Proxymity provides post-meeting vote confirmation for issuers, intermediaries and institutional investors.
The announcement comes just as the 2021 shareholder meeting season is set to get underway. It also comes in the wake of increased focus on engagement and stewardship in the asset management market as underlined by the Shareholder Rights Directive.
The argument for more digital voting services has also gained ground as a result of the pandemic with a number of European jurisdictions passing legislation in 2020 to allow for virtual annual general meetings.
Consequently there have been a number of projects launched in recent months, aiming to make the proxy voting process more efficient and transparent.
In February, Deutsche Bank’s asset management arm DWS announced a new pooled funds service developed with ManCo platform AMX, Minerva Analytics and Northern Trust, designed to allow pension funds to be more active in stewardship.
Proxymity was originally developed by Citi but was spun off in May 2020 to an industry consortium which includes Deustche Bank along with other asset servicing groups such as BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Computershare, HSBC, JPMorgan, and State Street.
The digitised voting service uses the ISO 20022 messaging standard and will available to Deutsche bank clients in ten European markets: Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
© 2021 funds europe
