There is a version of the next decade in which tens of millions of European investors — pension members, retail fund holders, beneficiaries of insurance products — routinely direct the votes attached to the shares their capital ultimately funds. The technology exists and is in use. The demand is real and growing on both the institutional and the retail side. What stands between the present and that future is not innovation or appetite; it is a small number of specific points in the regulatory architecture where a targeted intervention would convert a patchwork of pioneering programmes into infrastructure that scales.

It is in that spirit which our company, Tumelo, has just responded to the European Commission’s Call for Evidence on the update of the Shareholder Rights Directive. We operate the pass-through voting platform that sits behind a number of major asset managers and the asset owners who invest with them — six fund managers globally, more than twenty-five asset owners, and over £300 billion in assets. We see, every day, where things work and where they catch. From that vantage point, the SRD review is a real opportunity. A handful of carefully chosen unlocks could expand the franchise of European shareholder democracy by an order of magnitude. Our written response to the Commission sets out a number of these. In this post we focus on three that, taken together, illustrate the kind of intervention we hope for.

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