Continental started offering Virtual Shareholder Meetings (VSMs) in March of 2020 as the COVID pandemic affected business and our customer’s annual meeting plans.

Eighteen months later, we have successfully completed over 400 virtual shareholder meetings. These meetings consist of: Annual Meetings, Extraordinary General Meetings, Special Meetings and Merger Related Meetings. We also completed virtual meetings for private clients as well as clients of other transfer agents.

Our platform is very flexible. As an example, we provide “Chat Box” for shareholders to ask questions either before or during the meeting. We also allow voting during the meeting with a valid control number. Additional refinements include slide presentations, multiple listen-only lines, and a specific URL address for a client meeting. We offer a video platform for clients who wish to offer their shareholders the visibility to see the Board of Directors virtually. The log-in capability has been expanded from 100 shareholders to 300. The listen-only line has increased from 1,000 to 2,000 shareholders.

The most exciting improvement is Application Programming Interface (API). API allows beneficial investors to join the meeting with a valid control number generated by either Mediant Communications or Broadridge. Once the control number is entered in our system, a message is sent to either intermediary to approve that the control number is valid and then allows the beneficial investor to join the meeting with full functionality. Continental does not charge for this optional service, nor does Mediant. Broadridge applies a fee based on the number of beneficial investors.

With the incredible effort of our highly skilled proxy team, we completed 9 VSMs during a morning at the end of September. Five of these VSMs were successfully managed during the same hour.

             – Robert Zubrycki, VP & Director of Mail Operations

For additional information or to see a demo, please contact Robert Zubrycki by email: rzubrycki@continentalstock.com.