A FTSE SMALL CAP Company Secretary writes...
“I am the Company Secretary of a FTSE Small Cap. Our Registrars are encouraging us not to send out a hard copy of the proxy form for our forthcoming AGM and to go paperless. If we decide to retain the hard copy proxy form they will charge us an additional fee of £1,800.
I have expressed some concerns (we have many retail shareholders, some of whom are elderly and may not wish to vote online), but the Registrars have assured me that many of their clients have agreed to go ‘paperless’ and they do not envisage any problems.
I would be grateful to know the views of other CoSecs on this matter. Whether they have been asked to go ‘paperless’ by their Registrars and if so if they have agreed to do so, or whether if they have not yet been asked to go ‘paperless’ this is something that they would happily consider.”
I have not been contacted by Link (also our Registrar) on this … by the sounds of it, I need to add, yet! Not sure what my views are, so this Q&A trail is helpful in allowing me to think about it in advance. I like the idea of informing shareholders of the intention to do so (if this is the way we decide to go) the year before to give shareholders the opportunity to object if they want to …
At the suggestion of our registrars (also Link) we have gone paperless this year but wrote to shareholders last year advising them of this intention. Link will provide a generic paper form if specifically requested. It will be interesting to see how many are requested and whether it makes any difference to our voting figures.
Link are talking to us about it. We have a largish number of retail shareholders (mainly ex employees) and 80 or so turn up to the AGM. So a paperless proxy probably wont impact them. We still have a number of shareholders who refuse to go to soft copy report and accounts and insist on hard copy. I am certainly thinking about going paperless – but too late for this year’s AGM.
It was mentioned as an option by our Registrars. I’m looking into it as it seems a good idea, in particular now that I’m seeing the opinion of other cosecs.
Last year, we only had three shareholders who used a paper-based proxy form, so for us it was a simple decision to agree to the request this year.
Are the registrars Link by any chance? They’ve been asking (not forcing) my company to not use customised proxy cards for this year’s AGM in JUly (i.e. not using proxy cards printed with the individual shareholder’s details). Note that we are not being asked to go completely paperless, because we’ll still produce a pdf of a (non-customised) proxy card which a shareholder can obtain via the company website, or from the company or from the registrar if they want to fill in and submit a hard copy. The customised proxy cards have been the postal “carrier” for our mailing out of the report and accounts and notice of AGM, and we’ll not need them for this purpose.
We’re going to make the change, and I know of another listed company (who also has Link as their registrar) who is doing likewise.
Link came up with some pretty compelling statistics to show that customised proxy cards are largely a waste of effort and money. A very small percentage (under 5%) of votes at our last AGM (whether measured by number of cards returned versus those posted out, or by number of votes cast) were done by a shareholder returning a hard copy customised proxy card.
You can justify the change by use of the “green” argument – saving paper. And also there’s a bit of a data protection benefit – there will not be going out in the post thousands of proxy cards containing personal details.
Yes, no doubt there will be retail shareholders who don’t like the change, and it will be a hassle/expense to take the phone calls and to send them a blank hard copy proxy to return, and each company has to do what is right for it, but we’re making the change.
Link didn’t say they’d charge us a fee this year if we wanted to retain hard copy customised proxy cards, but they did indicate that in future years they may have to.
We too have been asked by the registrar to go paperless and not send out a hard copy proxy card. We have decided to keep cards in place for this year and added a note of our intentions to move online in 2020. As most of our shareholders are institutions who already vote online we don’t envisage much, if any, push back.
We moved to paperless proxy forms this year and it has been very straightforward – no issues encountered at all (although like others we have few retail investors). You need to make sure that your Articles enable this, albeit I would be surprised if that was an issue either.
However, I would recommend it. Simple and easy and we have not received a single complaint.
We introduced this last year and did not have any complaints. However, we do not have a significant number of retail shareholders, and do send a hard copy out to a shareholder if they contact us directly. We are doing the same again this year.
We did this a couple of years ago. There has been some resistance from some older shareholders but the numbers speak for themselves. We have a PDF available on our website together with instructions on where to send it to, some people who have violently objected still get sent a non-personalised proxy form and both we and our registrars send them out as and when requested. I think it’s worth it