Taiwan Depository & Clearing Corporation

As the peak shareholder meeting season arrives, many investors are getting ready. In annual general meetings, investors can obtain firsthand information about their invested companies’ operations and exercise their rights. However, Taiwan has sounded the alarm on Covid-19 again as confirmed domestic cases have surged recently. Attending shareholder meetings in person may raise concerns over cluster infections.

In response, the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) continues to encourage investors to participate in the meetings via electronic voting systems, instead of attending in person. The Taiwan Depository & Clearing Corporation (TDCC) provides three main e-voting channels for shareholders, which have clear interfaces, are easy to use and, more importantly, allow all investors to join meetings and exercise their voting rights anytime and anywhere. Online voting is the optimal choice to promote shareholder activism and effectively avoid cluster infections.

Ms. Jane Huang, the TDCC Senior Vice President, stated that investors can cast their votes through securities trading applications, the TDCC-designed application ePASSBOOK, or the Stockvote website. Investors can choose the platform they are most familiar with to conduct e-voting.

If investors want to vote through their firm’s securities trading app, all they have to do is log in and tap E-voting. Then the app will redirect them to the voting platform. Please visit the Stockvote website for the list of securities firm apps with e-voting service.

If investors wish to vote by using the ePASSBOOK app, they will see a shortcut named Stockvote at the bottom of the Home Page (My Asset) once they log in. This will take you to the e-voting platform.

If investors prefer to vote with the Stockvote website, they need to select Shareholder and then log in with a corresponding certificate. A natural person will need a citizen digital certificate, a securities online trading certificate, or an online bank certificate for identity verification. A legal person will need a Ministry of Economic Affairs Certificate Authority (MOEACA) certificate, a securities and futures shared certificate, a Government Certification Authority (GCA) certificate, or an organization/entity certificate for identity verification.

Worth mentioning is that there are plans to introduce the Taiwan Fast Identity Online (TW FidO) service promoted by the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) for e-voting in shareholder meetings this year. Investors just need to sign in to the TW FidO website with their citizen digital certificates and then bind their mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, to their accounts. This will allow easy future logins using mobile biometric identification. Online voting for shareholder meetings is not the only place where the TW FidO can be used for identity verification. People can also use this multipurpose service for individual income tax filing, the MyData System of the National Development Council (NDC), and the one-stop citizen services systems of some local governments.

For foreign shareholders without certificates, the TDCC has been using CN code application services as the identification mechanism for logging in since last year. The English user interface of the voting system has been available for foreign investors to attend shareholder meetings and cast their votes online from anywhere around the globe. The use of e-voting for such meetings can not only protect shareholders’ rights but also help prevent the spread of the pandemic in Taiwan.