This article was originally posted on the Lumi website on 18th November 2019 and has been recreated below in full.

Lumi has announced the successful completion of the Elia Group Extraordinary General Meeting on November 8^th 2019 as a pilot borne out of a collaboration with themselves and the Citi developed Proxymity^SM Platform. As a result of the collaboration the EGM benefitted from features such as voting transparency right through the custodian chain as well as post meeting vote confirmation.

The Proxymity platform was available for investors and allowed them to vote up to market deadline, and at the same time gave Elia real-time confirmation of investor votes as soon as they were entered. These votes were then seamlessly integrated into the Lumi platform for the live meeting, combining proxy votes with the in-room votes for instant, accurate results.

After the voting closed the full results were transmitted back through the Proxymity platform to close the loop, allowing vote confirmation to be directly available for both the issuer and the institutional investors. These features amongst others will help users to comply with the soon-to-be implemented revised Shareholder Rights Directive, aka SRD II, which will be enforced across all of the EU markets in September 2020. SRD II will apply to issuers, investors and intermediaries and does advocate the use of technology to help with compliance, so forward thinking platforms such as Lumi and Proxymity could be the key to helping many companies in the custody chain.

“It was great to be able to see the benefits of an automated platform handling the votes coming in from the investors and shareholders on the platform. This is not a luxury that we have had the benefit of before,” said Elia.

“As Proxymity continues to gain momentum, we are pleased to support a growing number of issuers and investors on the platform and meet users’ requirements for a simpler, faster and more transparent way of performing proxy voting,” said Dean Little , co-founder of  the Proxymity^SM Platform, Citi. “We look forward to continuing to work with Lumi and other key stakeholders across the proxy voting ecosystem to deliver further efficiency and bring additional markets on to the platform.”

“This is an exciting time.  A number of trends are coming together to make it much easier for companies and their owners to communicate and take decisions.  The key is to digitise as much as possible of the processes which surround the annual general meeting, before, during and after,” said Richard Taylor, CEO of Lumi. “Working directly with Proxymity, we are able to build on our existing digital voting platform during the live meeting to offer a more comprehensive, integrated and transparent experience for the benefit of listed companies as well as their shareholders.”