Pair up the two conversations to choose a voting layer built for the market ahead.
Co-authored by Tumelo and Proxymity.
For most of the last two decades, the proxy ecosystem has been quiet. If you were a custodian, you used incumbent providers for global proxy distribution. If you were an asset manager, you took your voting research from one of the established proxy advisors. There wasn't much to decide.
That isn't the world we're in anymore.
Custodians around the world are taking a fresh look at their global proxy distribution. Incumbent providers built the rails the industry runs on, and that's no small thing, but custodians are looking for more and are finding a wider range of options available to them than ever before. Different markets, different accounts, different providers, each chosen to fit the bank's needs and its clients' priorities.
At the same time, on the other side of the chain, stewardship teams at asset managers are doing the same exercise on their voting partners. Established proxy advisors have set the tone for years, but new entrants like Tumelo, new technology (Tumelo's ProxyBeacon among them) and new client pressures mean this is shifting.
Here's what we've been wondering: are these two groups talking to each other?
In most firms, they're not. The custody management team and the stewardship team sit in different parts of the building, with different mandates and different vendor relationships. And yet their worlds are far more interconnected than it looks from inside either silo. A custody decision can impact which proxy intermediary handles your European ballots which can quietly narrow which voting platforms you're able to use, and a stewardship decision about your voting partner can do the same in reverse. The plumbing constrains the policy, and the policy constrains what you can ask of the plumbing.
Historically, most custodians have used a finite number of global proxy voting providers to cover all markets.
This has now changed.
Custodians are now using different, and in some cases multiple proxy voting providers, varying by market, account or business line. Asset managers using a range of custodians are now confronted with different experiences, sometimes for the same market or meeting, depending on where their shares are held in custody. For instance, an asset manager may hold the same stock in two different fund portfolios through two different custodians, each using a different global proxy distribution provider. As a result, the asset manager could receive different deadlines and have access to different voting tools for the same holding.
This complexity is being introduced because newer, more technology-forward providers can deliver better outcomes for clients: improved ballot specific voting deadlines, modern APIs, and greater transparency into vote outcomes. In practice, that means the same investor may now have ballots distributed through incumbent providers for some holdings and through Proxymity for others, split by custodian, market in some cases, account-by-account in others.
For the investor, those improvements are real. But they only reach the end of the chain if the platform they vote through can correctly handle whichever provider sits behind each of their holdings.
One area where this complexity is felt most acutely is cross-border voting. Investors frequently hold securities in companies listed outside their home market, with those holdings held and settled through intermediaries and CSDs operating in the relevant local market. The result is an intermediary chain that can stretch to six, seven or more steps, each with its own processes and local market rules to comply with. Every additional intermediary needs time to process and pass on information, and that time impacts the voting deadline available to the investor at the end of the chain.
Voting deadlines in cross-border structures therefore reflect the time each intermediary needs to process information and comply with local market rules, working backwards from the issuer's market deadline. This means that an investor holding the same security across multiple accounts, some domestic, some cross-border, can legitimately receive different voting deadlines for the same meeting. That is not inconsistent. It is an accurate reflection of the different settlement structures underlying each holding.
What makes this particularly challenging is that many investors vote through third-party platforms that aggregate ballots across custodians. Where those platforms default to the most conservative deadline across all holdings, the result can look like an unusually early or erratic deadline, when the reality is more nuanced.
Proxymity is a digital investor communications platform connecting issuers, intermediaries and investors in real-time. Where incumbent processes have been manual, fragmented and slow, Proxymity's approach is built on direct connectivity to issuers, issuer agents and CSDs, meaning information is more accurate, arrives faster and is less susceptible to the delays and errors that can accumulate at each step of the intermediary chain. The platform is backed by a consortium of the industry's leading financial institutions, including eight of the world's top 10 global custodians managing over $290 trillion in assets under custody.
Vote Connect, Proxymity's proxy voting solution, sources meeting announcements directly from issuers, issuer agents and CSDs, enabling real-time ballot distribution and longer voting windows. For global custodians and cross-border intermediaries, Vote Connect Global extends across 100+ markets, working closely with local market sub-custodians to optimise deadlines and meet local regulatory requirements.
Proxymity’s Investor Portal gives institutional investors a single online user interface to manage the full proxy voting lifecycle, from ballot notifications through to vote execution and reporting. It provides direct visibility of ballot-level deadlines across all holdings and clear sight of pending votes and vote statuses, helping ensure no vote is missed.
As custodians use multiple proxy providers across different markets and accounts, investors benefit most from platforms that can sit above all of them and submit through the different networks seamlessly. This ensures they can take full advantage of the improvements proxy providers make without the operational burden of managing multiple platforms.
With incumbent providers, votes aren’t always automatically confirmed as received, so operations teams often need to manually check and follow up to ensure each vote has been successfully recorded. Newer providers offer more reliable, automated submission through APIs, reducing the need for that manual oversight.
It isn’t just the pipes that are rapidly changing, but also the decision-making layer on top.
This dual model kept prices competitive since researching thousands of companies was a costly activity for advisors, and voting on thousands of resolutions was a costly activity for asset managers. Despite some appetite for wider choice, the economic efficiency of this model has helped sustain the current market structure, while advances in technology are now creating room for more tailored approaches alongside it.
AI is changing that economic calculation. The cost of delivering a custom policy collapses by roughly an order of magnitude, removing much of the cost barrier that made highly tailored policies impractical at scale. Beyond this, new use cases and workflow improvements are also emerging.
This is the shift Tumelo built ProxyBeacon for.
Editing custom policies
Take policy refinement. Adjusting a voting policy — what if we treat any director with more than four other public-company boards as overboarded, instead of five? — used to mean a request to the proxy advisor, weeks of waiting, emails back and forth on definitions, and a bill at the end. The process could last for months.
With a rules engine and the voting records connected to an LLM, the same change is an afternoon. The model generates two or three variants, backtests each against the last proxy season, and returns a comparison broken down by sector, geography and issuer size. Policy refinement that used to take months of interaction with an external supplier now takes an afternoon and an internal decision.
Responding to RFPs
Or take RFPs. A 20-question institutional RFP — how many ballots did we vote, on what percentage of resolutions did we vote against management, how does that differ for this client's holdings versus the firm-wide book — used to swallow a week of senior analyst time and produced slightly different numbers each time because the underlying analysis was re-done from scratch.
Connect the same voting and engagement records to an LLM through MCP and the work changes shape. The model queries the records, applies the right cuts, composes a clean response for each question, and returns it with citations back to the source. The analyst reviews and edits where judgement is actually required. A week becomes an afternoon — and because every answer traces back to the records, responses don't drift between analysts.
What once was an industry defined by a small number of dominant players is now shifting thanks to innovation in the proxy voting space.
The architecture is already being built, by providers who can see what the next decade of stewardship will look like. Asset managers that bring their custody and stewardship conversations together, insist on a voting layer that works across all intermediaries, and choose tools built for where the market is heading will be better placed to meet the expectations of their clients and shape what modern stewardship looks like.