Proxymity, the digital investor communications platform developed within Citi’s Institutional Clients Group, has raised $20.5 million in a strategic round of investment and will form its own entity via an industry-led consortium.

The consortium brings together custodians and issuer agents, ensuring instant access to the world’s investors and companies. BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Computershare, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, J.P.Morgan and State Street comprise the Proxymity consortium.

With the new investment and commitment from the consortium, Proxymity will significantly scale its platform offerings, so that it can deliver its services to a wider client base and across a broad range of geographic markets.

Its immediate focus will be the EU markets ahead of the forthcoming Shareholder Rights Directive II implementation.

Proxymity’s services include a real-time electronic proxy voting platform, which provides post-meeting vote confirmation and gives investors up to nine more days per meeting to research and vote. It also offers a shareholder disclosure platform, which automates shareholder ID requests in industry compliant formats, without the need for any manual intervention.

The Proxymity team will be based in London. Co-founders Dean Little and Jonathan Smalley have been appointed chief executive and chief operating officer, respectively.

“We’re extremely proud of what Proxymity has achieved so far within Citi since we developed the platform in 2017," stated Little. "To date, Proxymity has supported over 3,000 shareholder meetings and, after successful pilots, we’ve fully launched the platform in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Australia, as well as a pilot in Spain."

Little and Smalley formulated the idea for Proxymity while working in Citi’s Equities and Securities Services (ESS) Custody Product group through an innovation program. As the idea for the platform evolved, Citi’s Innovation Lab network and D10XSM program helped Proxymity iterate and evaluate its vision to improve the proxy voting system. The platform was first launched in the UK in 2018.

In addition to a commercial team based in London, Proxymity will maintain a technology and development team in Tel Aviv.

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