The general meeting services offered by Euroclear Finland help companies with the fluent and secure implementation of general meetings. The need for organizing general meetings either entirely remotely or as a combination of remote meeting and physical presence became evident in the exceptional circumstances of 2020. The situation required flexibility and innovative thinking from each party. All general meetings were successfully carried out with different measures, without compromising on the legal requirements of the meeting.
The Finnish Parliament has decided to continue the temporary statutes of the Companies Act on the organization of general meetings in exceptional circumstances until 30 June 2021.
“General meeting is a limited company’s highest decision-making body, which in a listed company can make decisions worth even billions of euros. It is important that the Ministry of Justice started working on the continuation of the temporary amendment and we got reassurance about next spring’s legal basis early enough. Ensuring general meeting decisions and implementing shareholders’ rights require multi-channel general meetings. We are currently investing in them and will certainly witness new types of general meetings in the spring. In addition to remotely watching the meeting, I believe some of our client companies will offer their shareholders also genuine remote participation in the general meeting. We will implement this part together with our partner who has experience in organizing over 2 500 hybrid/online meetings during this year”, says Sales and Relationship Manager Esa Kankkunen, Euroclear Finland.
Based on the feedback from clients, Euroclear Finland is renewing its general meeting services for the meeting season 2021. A wide selection of different solutions will be available, with the combination of which a company can carry out a general meeting in the best possible way. For example, it will be possible to combine webcasting or online voting to a general meeting with Euroclear Finland’s service.
”The exceptional circumstances accelerated the need for renewing companies’ general meetings. The shareholders’ needs for remote participation and the stipulations brought by the renewed regulation can now be taken into account while planning general meetings. We are pleased to be able to respond to the requirements of the changed situation, together with our partners”, says Anu Puttonen, Chief Business Officer, Euroclear Finland.
In the first stage, strong authentication for registering into general meetings and advance voting will be brought to Finnish shareholders already during autumn 2020. Advance votes from Finnish and foreign shareholders are compiled before the general meeting, which facilitates the running of the general meeting considerably. Information about the decisions are conveyed after the meeting to those foreign shareholders who have asked for them.
Euroclear Finland is among the first European CSDs to introduce SRDII compliant general meeting messages, enabling foreign shareholders in the custody chain to get general meeting messages in a new standardized way and to use their voting right more effectively.
