In October 2014, National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, announced a launch of the corporate actions reform within the framework of which NSD planned to use a new principle of corporate actions processing together with market participants and the regulator.
NSD works on implementation of international standards and interaction formats, in particular, of an electronic document interchange, and conducting all processes through the record keeping institutions without the use of paper documents.
During the reform, NSD has developed a special communications campaign paying special attention to informing different target audiences about innovations and changes made.
In November 2014, Sergei Bernevega, Managing Director for Corporate Information, NSD, took part in a number of sectoral events in line with the communications campaign, including:
- 14th All-Russia’s Financial Market Participants Conference “Russia Today – Change of Economic Development Model?” organized by the Institute of Stock Market and Management (12 November);
- All-Russia’s Corporate Legislation Forum organized by the Corporate Bulletin magazine (12–13 November);
- 11th Federal Investment Forum organized by the Securities Market magazine and Investor.ru social network (21 November).
Mr. Bernevega spoke at the sessions and panels dedicated to the stock market infrastructure; he informed market participants about the progress of the corporate actions reform and advantages of the electronic voting system introduced in the course of the reform.
The electronic voting system allows securities holders to execute their rights remotely in several ways:
- by sending an instruction via their depositories and then through the record keeping system to an issuer - е-proxy voting;
- voting on the website which includes the use of electronic systems, providing live video broadcasting of the shareholder meeting and opportunity to ask questions to speakers remotely etc. – electronic voting (e-voting). This way of voting allows a securities holder to take part in a shareholder meeting remotely.
In his presentations Mr. Bernevega pointed out that the implementation of electronic voting in shareholder meetings will let issuers and investors reduce expenses and, what matters most, will provide equal terms for securities holders’ participation in managing a joint stock company regardless of their place of location.
Another important topic covered by Mr. Bernevega in his reports was implementation of principles of processing the international corporate actions (including securities holders' meetings) determining the requirements for a process of informing an investor about a corporate action. In particular, implementation of a new ISO 20022 standard will let use the straight through processing system at all stages of data processing.