Why is voting UK listed shares seem so difficult to achieve?
Firstly I am not here to knock Freetrade or 212 or who ever else, I am genuinely curious.
To set the scene, both Freetrade and 212 offer US share voting and 212 also is offering voting on shares listed in the UK but are ultimately non UK shares, such as B&M stores and Green core etc.
But it seems like there’s something greater going on as I called I-Web who is part of Halifax Share Dealing and Lloyds Banking Group and they mentioned that you can vote if you ask beforehand.
So even though I web is a provider that’s not a full service provider but half way there, one might say, the customer still need to look up when the vote is and notify them in advance.
Also I am going to call my works stock brokerage arm of thier business. They offer a generous employee discount which I admit is tempting.
It will be interesting to see if they do it automatically (IE if you hold the shares on the ex-voting date, you get the option to vote, no questions asked) or do you have to know when the vote is and notify so many days in advance.
The whole thing does raise the general question as to what in a more general sense is preventing a fair number of brokers offering it, or if they do offer it, the shareholder of those shares has to call or email so many days in advance to get things going.
The reason I mentioned the second question is as someone who works in the UK based stocks and shares industry and have done for 8 years, and used a number of providers in my time as well, I fully know that even when cost isn’t a direct concern, sometimes regulation or other things can make some parts of the investment infrastructure overly burocratic to the point where some people choose to discontinue with what they might have planned.
With the advent of fintechs that compel the industry
to modernise, and online processes instead of paper forms, over time this is getting less. That said in some part of the wider infrastructure overly burocratic processes to get things done can still exist.
Also another thing from a brokers point of view is that overly burocratic processes to implement this feature might actually be prohibitively expensive in the sense that even if the fee charged to do it is minimal or free, the admin work and hours the processing teams might need to spend on doing it and implementing it might, by proxy, make it prohibitively expensive.
A similar thing is to this is share perks, like the vouchers some stocks offer for example Mitchell’s and Butlers.
While it would seem it’s free to implement, the man hours it would take a lot of brokers to fully implement also make it, by proxy, prohibitively expensive, or diverting resources from key areas of the business.
I’ve written a little essay here, I get it. It’s a TLDR for some, I’m sure.
But I suspect that either of these are true or the 2nd is true and by proxy this also makes it too prohibitively expensive to implement.
As I say, from my end of the bargain I come at this from a genuine curiosity and am keen to gain an insight.
Any retail investor with 15 shares in Tesla or even 100 shares will be outvoted by big corporates as well.
In the share voting sphere all retail investors have been in this position, once someone has so much of a stock that the words retail investor doesn’t quite sound like a corect fit, then thier votes might slighty move the needle, but only slightly as the big corporates truly do dominate in the sphere.
I’m not complaining about the big corporates having such a sway in the vote share, it’s a fact of life as they have the capital to buy 40% or such and such of a company.