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How Blockchain Proxy-Voting Will Improve Shareholder Engagement
By Dr Mark van Rijmenam on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
We live in an increasingly globalized world. Although some world leaders believe that the future belongs to patriots rather than globalists, technology is making the world an ever more integrated and smaller place.
In fact, we can say that globalization has gone digital. In the 21st century, globalization is all about exchanging data. Thanks to the interconnected digital world that we live in, borders are disappearing, and national legislation is increasingly difficult to maintain. In today’s world, even a 1-person company can be a multi-national and thanks to blockchain and Security Token Offerings (STOs) organizations can raise funds from anywhere in the world.
Not only startups can benefit from these new distributed ledger technologies, but also existing public multi-national enterprises (MNEs) can use it to improve, for example, corporate governance. MNEs span multiple jurisdictions and territories, where variables such as technologies, infrastructure, markets, legislation and customer demands are different. In addition, shareholders can be located anywhere in the world, thereby directly affecting corporate governance.
Corporate Governance And Proxy Voting
Corporate governance controls how public MNEs behave. The objective of corporate governance is to ensure that the agent (the management of an organization) behaves as intended by the principal (the shareholders). To achieve that, there are multiple systems in place. One is the Annual General Meeting (AGM) where shareholders vote on proposals put forward by the management (or other shareholders). However, shareholders are often widely distributed across the globe and, hence, shareholder engagement systems such as the AGM face many inefficiencies, while especially during AGMs, the stakes are very high.
After all, it can cost an organization millions of dollars to create a proposal, communicate with shareholders and persuade them to vote in favor of it. The more shareholders…
