The road to digital AGM

The globalization is a challenge in every aspect of our life. For the global investment community the possibility to excersise their voting rights without a milleage contributien to the Frequent Flyer file is an obvious benefit. For Sopharma AD this effort is another contribution to an excellent corporate governance file.

Every beginning is difficult. For many years ther AGM was left behind in the 20^th century, when Internet was not yet accesible from every mobile device. After the first decade of the 21^st century turned, the Bulgarian Financial Supervision Commission permited voting by correspondence. Immediately after so did we. A couple of years later we tested our first electronic voting system, which we still used onsite at the AGM, but it was a giant step towards the digital AGM room we dreamed of.

The globalization is a challenge in every aspect of our life

Working on the voting system was a great learning experience, because we had to make a map of all the voting scenarios in order to plot them into the system. Once we were done and we tested the system we were very satisfied that it made the process of the AGM much smoother and also, we had a handy protocol.

We are still facing some challenges:

Global digital identification is still not a part of our everyday lifes.
Regulations are far from perfect when it comes to conducting AGM online.
The face-toface contact with management is still indispensible.

“Don’t try to prove to everybody that the reason why you can’t is that nobody could. It’s no excuse. You can break the tradition by being the first person to make it happen!

― Israelmore Ayivor