rezonanz Offering Pre-Disclosures Feed for 2025 AGM Season

As we've engaged with dozens of asset managers, asset owners and companies over the past year, proxy advisers have often been the focus of criticism. As a recent report from Focusing Capital on the Long-Term (FCLT) highlights, frustration has now shifted toward the entire proxy voting system—and more importantly, toward opportunities for change.

The Case for Transparency

In Beyond the Blame Game, Matthew Leatherman and Olivier Lebleu argue that dissatisfaction with proxy voting has evolved. As they note:

"Corporate and investment executives have vented occasional frustration with proxy advisers, the public-facing symbols of this system, for decades. In recent years, however, the sentiment has become much more steady than occasional, has refocused on the system rather than just on the proxy advisers as symbols, and has shifted toward a spirit of opportunity and not just frustration."

One of the study’s key recommendations? Pre-disclosing voting intentions to ‘get out the vote’ in an open-source manner. By making voting decisions public ahead of AGMs, investors can create more informed, coordinated, and impactful shareholder engagement.

As the authors note :

"There is a scale issue in the proxy voting system today. Only the largest investors have the means to staff large and sophisticated stewardship teams. If those same large investors were willing and able to share their voting intentions, it could serve as a source of guidance that helps all other market participants realize greater value from their votes than is possible today. This could be especially true for owners disclosing their home-market votes so that others can choose to follow them, benefitting from their information advantage."

One executive the authors quote states that “the company should at least see how their shareholders vote, and that was the reason for us pre-announcing our votes 5 days in advance. When we looked at whether it affected how other shareholders vote, actually it did, especially on more contentious votes.”

Another spoke to the impact this can drive: “Pre-announcing votes, we do selectively when we want to influence outcomes.”

Making Pre-Disclosures a Reality

At rezonanz, we believe in the power of transparency. Starting in mid-March 2025, we’re supporting the movement towards increased transparency by launching a first-of-its-kind feed of institutional investors’ pre-disclosures. Registered rezonanz users will be able to access pre-disclosed votes via the same intuitive interface they already use to compare historical voting records.

This new feature will provide unprecedented visibility into how institutional investors are voting before AGMs take place, helping to:

✅ Enable clearer learning and signaling
✅ Reduce coordination challenges between investors
✅ Encourage better-informed engagement with companies

Apple’s AGM: A Preview of What’s to Come

But why wait? With Apple’s AGM just hours away (February 25, 2025), in the picture above, you'll see the pre-disclosures from eight major investors managing over $2.7 trillion in assets. To provide an even clearer picture, we’ve categorized these investors using our Voting for Sustainability quartiles—where Quartile 4 represents the highest sustainability-aligned voting patterns, and Quartile 1 the lowest.

This early preview underscores how pre-disclosures can bring much-needed clarity and accountability to proxy voting decisions.

Stay Ahead of the Curve

We’re just getting started. If you want to be among the first to access institutional voting pre-disclosures for AGM season 2025, sign up for the rezonanz Newsletter today

Read the full report from FCLT: Beyond the Blame Game