Broadridge Brings Proxy Voting to Payward's Tokenised Equity Platform

Broadridge Financial Solutions has struck a deal with Payward Services to extend corporate voting rights to eligible holders of xStocks, the tokenised equities framework operated by Payward. The arrangement allows qualifying token holders to authenticate using Web3 credentials on ProxyVote.com, receive proxy materials for the underlying shares, and cast votes based on their token positions.

The move tackles a longstanding criticism of tokenised equities: that investors gain economic exposure to a listed company without the governance rights attached to direct share ownership. xStocks tokens are issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited as 1:1-backed instruments and are available to eligible customers outside the United States and, currently, outside the United Kingdom. The product operates under authorisation from Payward Digital Solutions Ltd. via the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and for EU and EEA customers through Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Ltd. under MiFID II.

"The endgame for tokenisation was never just building faster programmable capital markets," said Mark Greenberg, Payward's chief commercial officer and global head of Payward Services. "It's about giving people across the world everything that comes with owning a piece of a company, including a voice in how it's run."

Doug DeSchutter, president of Broadridge's investor communication solutions business, positioned the integration as a natural extension of the firm's existing digital asset governance capabilities. Broadridge already supports issuer-sponsored and custodial tokenised securities and processes roughly $357 billion a day in tokenised real assets through its Distributed Ledger Repo platform. The xStocks partnership adds a retail-facing, third-party tokenised equity component to that infrastructure.

Payward Services reports that xStocks now covers more than 500 tokenised assets spanning equities, ETFs, and pre-IPO instruments. The company claims the highest total transaction volume of any tokenised equities framework since launching in June 2025. Neither Broadridge nor Payward disclosed what share of total token holders will be eligible for the voting feature at launch, nor whether all underlying issuers have confirmed participation in the proxy process.

The governance partnership emerges amid growing regulatory scrutiny of tokenised securities on both sides of the Atlantic. In the European Union, MiCA and the updated MiFID II framework have brought tokenised transferable securities closer to the regulatory perimeter of their conventional counterparts, creating an expectation that investor protections — including voting rights — should accompany the instrument regardless of its settlement infrastructure.

The UK's Financial Conduct Authority has been consulting on its own digital securities sandbox and broader admissions and disclosures reform, though xStocks is not currently available to UK persons, which limits the immediate domestic relevance of the deal.

In the US, where xStocks cannot be offered, the SEC's position on tokenised securities remains contested. The absence of a clear governance standard for token-wrapped equities has been a recurring friction point for institutional adoption. Broadridge's approach of using its established proxy infrastructure as the governance layer, rather than building on-chain voting natively, reflects a pragmatic path that sidesteps unresolved regulatory questions about the legal status of on-chain votes.

The partnership represents an incremental but substantive step for tokenised equity infrastructure. Whether it accelerates institutional adoption will depend on uptake among the custodians and asset managers that currently sit outside Payward Services' primary partner base.