Your Stock Transfer Agent is BNY Mellon or Computershare. What should you do?

“Nothing”  is a perfectly good answer.   (See our  Summer 2011 Press Room article on Computershare’s impending acquisition of BNY  Mellon Shareowner Services.)   Both agents  are good, and as a combination they will be good.   Requisite documentation for BNY Mellon  clients will be streamlined, and a team of IT experts will oversee the  conversion of BNY Mellon accounts to Computershare’s record keeping  system.   Still, we know many companies  are also taking this opportunity to ensure their ongoing contract with the “New Computershare” is best practices, before their leverage to do so is diminished – indeed, many are doing a full Request for Proposal (RFP)  exercise.

The  arguments for a contract review only, what we offer as a Shareholder Services  Check-Up®, are:

  • You negotiate an optimal contract with your transfer agent before you become one of many thousands of other corporate clients
  • Best practices and cost savings are achieved without changing agents
  • No time is spent overseeing an RFP process
  • The current agent sees you value the relationship enough to simply want to “fix what’s broken”

The  arguments for an RFP, which we can also facilitate, are:

  • If you are a BNY Mellon client your records are going to be converted anyway, so why not look at other agents/systems now
  • You could wind up with better pricing and a more equitable contract as one of a relatively modest number of corporate clients, if you did change agents as a result of the RFP
  • By using an expert like us to simplify and expedite the process, not that much time would be consumed to reach the company’s goal

The  bottom line is BNY Mellon and Computershare clients have three good choices:

  • Go along with what will likely be a smooth (enough) ride
  • Fix what might be broken in advance of the merger, through a “check-up”
  • Do an RFP, to gain a full  understanding of transfer agent alternatives in today’s marketplace.