Broadridge Financial Solutions has agreed to extend its proxy voting and shareholder communications infrastructure to cover eligible holders of xStocks, the tokenised equities framework operated by Payward Services. The arrangement means that qualifying token holders can authenticate via Web3 credentials to ProxyVote.com, receive proxy materials for the underlying securities, and submit voting preferences in line with their token positions.

The announcement addresses one of the more persistent criticisms of tokenised equities: that holders acquire economic exposure to a listed company without inheriting the governance rights that accompany direct share ownership. xStocks tokens are structured as 1:1-backed instruments issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited and are available to eligible customers outside the United States and, currently, outside the United Kingdom. The product is authorised through Payward Digital Solutions Ltd. under the Bermuda Monetary Authority and, for EU and EEA customers, through Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Ltd. under MiFID II.

Closing the governance gap

“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, framed the move as an extension of the firm’s existing digital asset governance work. Broadridge already supports issuer-sponsored and custodial tokenised securities and processes what it describes as approximately $357 billion a day in tokenised real assets through its Distributed Ledger Repo platform. The xStocks integration adds a retail-facing, third-party tokenised equity layer to that infrastructure.

Payward Services says xStocks now spans more than 500 tokenised assets across equities, ETFs and pre-IPO instruments, and claims the highest total transaction volume of any tokenised equities framework since the product launched in June 2025. The company did not disclose what proportion of total token holders are in scope for the voting capability from launch, nor whether all underlying issuers have confirmed participation in the proxy process.

Regulatory read-across

The governance tie-up arrives as tokenised securities attract sustained regulatory attention 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 travel with the instrument regardless of its settlement rails. 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 today’s deal.

In the US, where xStocks cannot be offered, the SEC’s position on tokenised securities remains contested, and the absence of a clear governance standard for token-wrapped equities has been a recurring point of friction 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.

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