OMESTI Bhd which has a penchant to roll out disruptive technologies has identified a business goldmine in its affordable virtual meeting platform which serves to complement physical annual general meetings (AGM) of listed companies.
The company has recently unveiled NextAGM which is equipped with full proxy and electronic voting features in strict compliance with regulatory requirements.
To re-cap, many listed companies had to stage their AGMs virtually during the enforcement of the movement control order (MCO) given the imposition of travel restriction and social distancing rules.
“Given that there are currently circa 900 listed companies in Bursa Malaysia, the total market size is estimated to be in excess of RM5-RM10 mil per annum,” OMESTI’s group technology officer Mathieu Chauvinc told FocusM.
“This include AGMs as well as any Extraordinary General Meetings (EGMs) that need to be held.”
According to Chauvinc, there has been a marked increase in the use of the virtual AGM platform during the MCO and conditional MCO (CMCO) as listed companies are made to comply with the requirements of market regulators Bursa Malaysia and the Securities Commission irrespective of the severity of the COVID-19 outcome.
Moreover, the AGM trend is slowly shifting to a hybrid environment whereby physical AGM/EGMs are gradually being complemented with a virtual platform for the benefit of shareholders who reside in remote locations.
“As digital adoption becomes more commonplace in day-to-day business, we foresee that this style of meeting will become the norm as opposed to the exception,” reckoned Chauvinc.
“Client requirements and therefore the platform features and functionality are shifting aggressively as people get used to the technology. Adoption has been very promising as companies could come to recognise the savings – both in terms of time and expenditure – of running virtual AGMs over conventional AGMs.”
The current industry players in this space include Tricor, Azeus Convene, Hong Bao Media (primarily focused on Singapore at present), KPMG and Vote2U (voting functionality).
Moving forward, Chauvinc noted that the basic technology behind this type of virtual meeting solution is diverse enough for it to be used for various types of meetings such as sales meeting, promotional showcase events or trade expos where two-way interaction and digital signing required.
“This functionality can be easily adapted to many other industries; a good example is education where the ‘agenda’ will be a ‘daily schedule’ instead, and ‘voting’ can be used for quizzes and question and answer sessions for a one-to-one with the teacher,” added Chauvinc. – Dec 15, 2020
