"Every year when the March shareholder meeting season arrives, there has been much talk about 'Super AGM Week' and the limitations on shareholders' accessibility. With the launch of 'eVOP,' which overcomes the temporal and spatial constraints of shareholder meetings, such remarks will significantly decrease starting next year."
Lee Yoon-soo, president of the Korea Securities Depository (KSD), said this while introducing eVOP, the company's in-house developed electronic voting rights platform, at the "Commemorative Event for the Introduction of Electronic Shareholder Meetings and the Opening of the Platform" held on Wednesday at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul's Jongno-gu district.
Lee said, "A new global standard for electronic voting rights will be formed, allowing domestic and international investors to easily exercise their voting rights regardless of their location," emphasizing that it "will also contribute to achieving a Korea premium in our capital market."
EVOP is a comprehensive support platform for electronic voting rights, including electronic shareholder meetings. It was built to coincide with the mandatory implementation of electronic shareholder meetings for listed companies with total assets of 2 trillion won or more starting January 1 next year, under the amended Commercial Act.
According to KSD, there are approximately 210 companies subject to this mandate. eVOP supports all processes, from pre-meeting electronic voting conducted up until the day before the shareholder meeting to voting at the electronic meeting hall on the day of the meeting. The existing electronic voting system, K-VOTE, will be integrated into eVOP.
EVOP supports PCs, smartphones, and tablet PCs. Similar to a video conference, users can watch the live shareholder meeting and ask questions directly via text or voice, and vote by indicating their approval or disapproval for each agenda item. Shareholders attending in person can also easily exercise their voting rights using their smartphones.
Investors can conduct pre-meeting electronic voting, grant electronic proxies, and apply to attend the electronic shareholder meeting from 10 days before the meeting until 5 p.m. on the day before. Attendance information for online and in-person meetings is linked in real time to prevent duplicate attendance and the double exercise of voting rights. It is also possible to move between and attend multiple companies' electronic shareholder meetings held at the same time.
To protect shareholders' voting rights, KSD has implemented physical security measures at a level comparable to those applied to electronic registration and settlement operations, anti-hacking countermeasures, and a triple-layered data protection system. Foreign shareholders can obtain shareholder identification codes and passwords through their domestic permanent agents to complete identity verification.
In particular, the company is preparing for situations such as shareholder meetings of companies with many minority shareholders like Samsung Electronics, or days when multiple companies' shareholder meetings are concentrated, by implementing system lightweighting and emergency response plans in case of failures.
Lee said, "While we cannot disclose the exact number of simultaneous connections for security reasons, we have secured connection processing capacity that exceeds the seating capacity of the Jamsil Stadium."
He continued, "We prepared on the assumption that all large listed companies subject to the mandatory electronic shareholder meeting requirement would use eVOP." The official seating capacity of the Jamsil Olympic Stadium is known to be up to 100,000.
"Responsibility for failures will be carefully examined and determined during the contract process with listed companies. I believe responsibility will be assigned depending on where the cause of the incident lies," Lee said.
KSD will hold a pilot shareholder meeting utilizing eVOP next month in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice and the Korea Association of Listed Companies. The company also plans to establish practical training courses for the electronic shareholder meeting platform to ensure the smooth establishment of the electronic shareholder meeting system.
Following the ceremony, KSD held an electronic shareholder meeting seminar for approximately 330 shareholders' meeting officers from over 210 listed companies subject to the mandatory electronic meeting requirement.
The seminar introduced the service scope and features of eVOP and included a system demonstration tailored to the procedures for holding shareholder meetings.
It also featured a Q&A session on practical considerations and preparation procedures for listed companies regarding the introduction of electronic shareholder meetings, as well as an explanation of key legal issues by Kim Ji-pyeong, a lawyer at Kim & Chang.
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