LDV is a new process that matches securities lenders' loaned shares to broker securities that would otherwise go unvoted, enabling lenders to direct proxies without recalling loans. It substantially improves existing market practices, which require lenders to recall loan in order to vote proxies. Recalls are inefficient in that they reduce overall lending and borrowing revenue, and create instability in loan, borrow, and collateral portfolios.
LDV benefits all participants in the securities finance industry. Lenders are better able to exercise their corporate governance responsibilities and, since lenders recall fewer loans, overall securities lending volume and revenue increase. Loan, borrow, and collateral portfolios are more stable, allowing agents and brokers to more effectively manage investment, counterparty, and operational risks. Corporate issuers receive more proxy votes from long-term investors, allowing them to reach quorum more quickly and at lower cost, and counterbalance votes of short-term activists. Higher loan volumes also improve financial market liquidity and price discovery.
Historically, institutional securities lenders had to forgo voting rights on loaned shares because there was no mechanism to vote without recalls. Recent technology and transparency improvements in securities finance markets, however, enable loaned shares to be matched with broker shares that would otherwise go unvoted. In particular, the Agent Lender Disclosure Initiative made apparent the direct counterparty relationship between lenders and broker-borrowers and provided brokers with detailed loan data necessary to include lenders in their proxy allocation routines.
Approximately 60 billion U.S. equities go unvoted each year[1], while roughly 15 billion shares are on loan[2], suggesting that sufficient votes could be available to meet lender vote demand. However, it is unlikely that lender voting interest will be fully covered for all issues, such as those with particularly contentious proxy events or that are hard-to-borrow in securities lending markets.
Does the broker have the lender’s shares on the proxy record date?
1. U.S. Federal Reserve Regulation T (“Reg T”) defines the permitted purposes for the extension of credit in the borrowing and lending of securities. In general, all of these purposes involve settling trades through re-delivery of the borrowed securities. Most often, the broker’s need to borrow has arisen after failing to receive securities required for an impending trade settlement, either as the result of an operational breakdown or after a short sale.
2. Given the broker-borrower’s mandatory compliance with Reg T, it can be argued that borrowed shares, which are re-delivered in the settlement of a trade, are not available on the broker’s books (as a technical matter, the position would be held at DTCC) in order to earn voting rights on the proxy record date. However, this argument would only be true per se if the settlement took place on the proxy record date, because an analysis of the ongoing process reveals that the proxy votes, not just the entitled shares, are properly treated as fully fungible on the broker-borrower’s books.
3. Reg T does not require that the borrowed shares be returned to the original lender when a subsequent receipt of securities is used to offset the original failure-to-receive. At that point, the borrower can certainly return the securities to the original lender. Yet, an active borrower can also compliantly decide to close a loan of the same securities with a different institutional lender whose terms may have become less attractive or from another broker-dealer lender who may be viewed as more likely to recall shares at an inconvenient time in the future, especially if the shares were borrowed for an ongoing short position. Still another reason may exist to hold the securities if the broker considers the return on its cash collateral, received through a rebate from the lender, to be very attractive compared with other investment options. In all those cases, as well as for actively traded issues where there may be a high risk of ongoing settlement failures, the broker can simply keep the newly-received shares in its inventory, balanced against its obligation to the lender.
4. As a result of efficient management of its settlement obligations, a broker – perhaps all brokers – may well have borrowed positions on their books on proxy record dates. The brokers would have gained the right to assign proxies or even to vote at the next corporate meeting as a direct result of the original loans from institutional lenders. In effect, the proxies are fungible on the brokers’ books, along with the borrowed shares themselves subject, of course, to an equitable assignment of proxy rights in compliance with stock exchange rules. Yet, brokers are not expressly permitted to assign proxies to their institutional lenders. At this point, the Lender Directed Voting (“LDV”) argument gains relevance and substance.
5. As noted, in addition to holding the shares cum voting rights, the broker also retains an obligation to its original lender. Indeed, one could argue that an institutional lender's ownership rights are stronger than those of other “beneficial owners” to whom the broker owes shares in the same securities. That is partly due to the distinction that can be drawn between the institutional lenders, who do not receive proxy assignments, and the broker’s own margin customers and hedge fund clients, who do receive proxy assignments. The distinction resides in the timeline of their property rights: the former owned the shares fully prior to lending them to the broker, while the latter required broker-financing in order to acquire their positions. Although we have seen that the institution’s shares may now be on the broker’s books, it is very likely that the financing customers’ shares are out on loan, i.e., hypothecated as collateral to source the broker’s own funding needs. And, in such cases, those positions are truly not in the brokers’ DTC account, although the brokers may well be assigning proxy rights to their accountholders. One can ably argue that those proxies would more equitably be assigned to the institutional lenders.
Brokers administer proxy allocation routines to distribute proxies to their customers. Since broker shares are held in fungible bulk and lenders have beneficial ownership to loaned shares, brokers can include lenders in their allocation routines. After brokers allocate proxies to lenders, standard proxy processes are followed to garner and submit voting instructions and submit them to corporate issuers. For example, proxies are assigned to Broadridge accounts designated for the lenders, then are instructed by lenders or ISS on the lenders' behalf.
Regulatory and operational considerations may pose challenges to matching custodians' unvoted shares with lenders’ loan positions. In particular, custodian shares are not held in fungible bulk, as are broker shares, which presents difficulties when considering custodial allocation of proxies across lender accounts. Furthermore, custodians are not counterparties on loans, so the lenders are not beneficial owners to any of the custodians’ unvoted shares.
Existing proxy reconciliation processes are sufficient to address any potential "over-reporting" issues. For example, brokers already use post-reconciliation processes to mitigate the risk of over-reporting that may arise from assigning proxies to margin customers whose shares may have been loaned or rehypothecated.
Beneficial owners and regulators have expressed concerns about voting opportunities being directed to preferred lenders or leveraged for beneficial loan terms. In the same way that agent lending queues are designed so that lenders get equitable access to borrower demand, brokers need pre-defined and algorithmic “proxy queues” to ensure equitable assignment of voting opportunities. Furthermore, on-going auditing and validation of proxy assignments may be needed to ensure against development of a “market for votes.”
Reallocation of the loans to brokers with available proxies would increase overall lender voting opportunities. However, numerous other loan factors would need to be taken into account, such as counterparty risk assessments and credit limits, loan prices, and collateral types and quantity. Considering these factors, loan reallocations may not be in the overall best interest of lenders and borrowers, and will have to be considered on a case-by-case basis.
To the extent that lenders receive proxies through LDV, they will not have to recall loans to regain voting rights. However, broker holdings change daily and varying numbers of investors vote, so the number of proxies that can be assigned to lenders cannot be known with certainty until just before the meeting date, which is typically two months after lenders must make record date recall decisions. The number of available proxies must therefore be forecasted, taking into account factors such as each broker's customer base, the scarcity of shares in the securities lending market, and the expected materiality of proxy ballot items.