The Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) is the national stock exchange of the Philippines that was established in 1992. Representing the country’s stock market, there are currently 280+ companies and corporations listed in the stock exchange.

The Philippine Stock Exchange held its virtual annual stockholders’ meeting (ASM) last July 2nd, 2021 with all board directors and stockholders joining remotely. To comply with COVID-19 health protocols and the guidelines of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the PSE utilized ConveneAGM’s all-in-one virtual meeting platform to broadcast its live ASM proceedings, while simultaneously allowing stockholders and proxies to cast their votes.

Stockholders voted on proposals indicated in the Notice of the Meeting and for the election of the fourteen nominees to the board of directors. They were able to start voting as early as 7:00 AM in the morning up to the end of the meeting.

Holding a Virtual Annual Stockholders’ Meeting During COVID-19

With the appearance of more dangerous and transmissible COVID-19 variants in the Philippines, it seems that the pandemic and local lockdowns will not be going away anytime soon. PSE like many other organizations in the country, needed to push through with their annual stockholders’ meeting to comply with legislative guidelines and corporate governance standards.

Improving Every Touchpoint of the User Experience

Clear and concise messaging was crucial for all stakeholders involved to be well-informed about the conduct of the meeting. PSE needed to make sure that all its information needed for the meeting was accessible to stockholders.

With the help of the ConveneAGM team they were able to correctly inform stockholders and proxyholders on how to vote and participate in the meetings. They ensured that key information would be visible be on the landing page of the ConveneAGM meeting portal site and that straightforward email notifications were sent to stockholders.

All-In-One Meeting Platform

A common problem faced by many corporations conducting their ASMs in-house in the previous year was the inability to streamline ASM processes into one single platform. For the PSE team, they saw that many organizations would haphazardly implement their own ASM solutions, without yet being familiar with virtual best practices. Those organizations then had a lot of difficulties and problems which affected ASM preparation and had an adverse affect on stockholder participation during the virtual annual stockholders’ meeting.

With ConveneAGM, the PSE was not only able to consolidate all ASM-related meeting processes into one platform, they were also able provide stockholders with much easier access to the meeting.

Using ConveneAGM’s Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality, stockholders who have already used the meeting platform before with other companies, only needed to reuse the same credentials in their initial registration. More importantly, using only their own set of credentials, stockholders were able to cast their votes, ask questions, and watch the live webcast of the proceedings in a single page on their web browser.

Proxyholders for Another Person

Last year, PSE had difficulties when it came to proxyholders. A lot of PSE’s stockholders preferred to assign another person (other than the chairman) as their proxy. These proxies would then have a lot of credentials they needed to remember, with some proxyholders representing the shares of more than 10 stockholders. They had to manually log into each one to access each stockholder’s ballot form which became a tedious process.

This year, with ConveneAGM they had the ability to simply assign multiple proxies to a single account. ConveneAGM’s intelligent proxyholder feature allows for proxyholders to only claim one single set of credentials. Using that single set of credentials, they were able to cast votes for their own shares (if they were stockholders) and also for all the shares and stockholders they proxied.

Through the voting form, they were able to see their number of shares, the names of the stockholders they proxied, and their respective number of shares. The voting form also indicated if the stockholder had provided any specific instructions on their proxy form or not.

For proxy forms with no instructions, they had the option to vote the same direction for all the shares they represent or vote differently for each stockholder they proxied.

Directed proxy forms or proxy forms with instructions from the original stockholder were protected from any changes. Their proxyholder only had the option to submit the pre-determined vote in the voting form.

Election of Directors

An important requirement for any stockholder meeting is the ability to support cumulative voting for the election of directors of a corporation. For PSE’s case, there were a total of fifteen (15) seats that needed to be filled. Each stockholder must have options to vote their number of shares for each of the nominees, not vote for any nominees, or vote only for a select few.

This is provided that the total number of votes cast would not exceed the number of shares owned, multiplied by the number of directors to be elected. For PSE’s election item, the number of shares of the stockholder was multiplied by fifteen and the product was the total number of votes they can use to cast among the different choices. PSE stockholders only needed to input their desired number of votes per candidate. If ever they surpassed the total votes allowed, ConveneAGM would immediately notify and prompted them to adjust their inputs.

ConveneAGM’s platform automatically computed the total number of votes a stockholder was allowed to cast, based on the number of shares owned. Through the meeting platform, validation and checking was automated and streamlined which is crucial in keeping the integrity of the votes.

The Benefits

The Philippine Stock Exchange was able to successful hold its virtual annual stockholders’ meeting by utilizing a smart, simple, and secure all-in-one virtual meeting platform. They were able to comply with health and regulatory guidelines and maintain its gold standard of corporate governance.

For PSE’s administrators, ConveneAGM’s features and flexibility were very useful and they appreciated the system’s ability to minimize their time and effort into preparing for the virtual annual stockholders’ meeting. They said that they felt secure in ConveneAGM’s ability to accommodate any sudden changes and were happy that the platform streamlined the meeting process.

For them, PSE stockholders were able to enjoy accessibility and engagement, through easier login procedures and by having all important ASM documents and matters handled within the ConveneAGM meeting platform.

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ConveneAGM is the leading all-in-one meeting platform for organizations and associations in Asia. ConveneAGM helps organizations hold their meetings through virtual or remote means, whether it be annual stockholder meetings or annual membership meetings. Discover how ConveneAGM can help organizations with their meeting needs.