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SEC and beneficial owners – rethinking proxy voting in a complex system

United States Securities and Exchange Commission HQ.
Photo: Getty Images

Efforts to engage with beneficial owners and provide them with mechanisms for influencing governance outcomes appear to be converging with a broader regulatory push for transparency.

At the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee meeting of 2025, the morning’s panel conversation turned to a fundamental challenge in modern corporate governance: how to meaningfully involve beneficial owners in proxy voting when shares are held through intermediated fund structures.

As traditional notions of shareholder democracy strain under the weight