Taiwan's Central Securities Depository Agency Plans to Launch eNotice to Reduce Paper Waste
The Taiwan Depository and Clearing Corporation (TDCC) announced a new service that will help the environment by getting rid of paper dividend notices and other forms of shareholder notification.
The new service, called eNotice, comes at a time when people are becoming more aware of the benefits of going paperless and adding to its digital initiatives, such as its e-voting app in 2015, a more user-friendly e-passbook app in 2017 with features like portfolio tracking, mandatory electronic voting for listed companies in 2018, and teleconferencing for shareholder meetings in 2022 to reduce public gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic.
By the end of 2022, more than 3.5 million people had downloaded TDCC's e-passbook app. The app just got another update that lets users check the balances of their trading accounts at 14 banks.
eNotice will turn written dividend notices and letters of notification into several digital formats. It is expected to save a lot of paper since half of Taiwan's 23 million people invest in the local stock market and each investor gets more than two notices a year.
Catherine Wang, Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Public Affairs at TDCC, says that the eNotice will first be used to send letters to company shareholders about cash or stock dividends. Eventually, it will be used for more complicated things like sending notices of general shareholder meetings or giving away shareholder gifts.
In December, TDCC added Moody's ESG Scores to its ESG dashboard. This was in addition to FTSE Russell ESG ratings for domestically listed companies, ISS ESG, MSCI, Sustainalytics, S&P ESG scores, and Glass Lewis Proxy Paper research reports.
Source: Taiwan News
