Small Teams Can Build Shareholder Meeting Agenda Services Too

The cost of reading shareholder meeting notices one by one is falling

The Financial Supervisory Service (금융감독원), Korea’s financial regulator, is working on a plan to make listed companies’ shareholder meeting information available through Open DART starting with the 2027 regular shareholder meeting season. The target is to complete system development and disclosure-form updates during 2026.

The planned data includes the date and location of shareholder meetings, the record date for voting rights, whether an electronic shareholder meeting will be held, and whether electronic voting will be available. It is also expected to include summaries and classifications for every agenda item, including director elections, limits on director and auditor remuneration, articles-of-incorporation amendments, financial statement approval, and dividends.

There will be three ways to access it: web lookup, Excel downloads, and an API. An API is a connection that lets one service retrieve information from another automatically rather than requiring a person to do it.

As of October 2026, Open DART had 83 publicly available API items, but a search for “shareholder meeting” returned only one item related to approved amounts for director and auditor remuneration. A feature for receiving all shareholder meeting agenda items in a standard format for each company is still being built.

Consider monitoring 100 companies. Today, someone must open 100 separate meeting notices and copy over dates, electronic voting availability, and agenda items. In the future, a service could connect once and automatically receive new notices and corrections. Open DART’s general API service is, in principle, free, so the obstacle for work that previously seemed too expensive was not data purchase costs but the staff time needed to read and transcribe these documents.

The same plan includes providing major financial statement notes, such as those on tangible assets, as separate line items during 2027. Financial statement notes are explanations attached to figures such as revenue or liabilities. Making them easier for computers to read would also make it easier to bring shareholder meeting agendas and related disclosures together on one screen.

However, the exact 2027 launch date, available items, update timing, treatment of corrected disclosures, and request limits have not yet been announced. The data will indicate whether electronic voting is offered; the plan does not make it possible to vote directly inside a new service.

How the work changes for a three-person investment-alert team

Imagine a three-person team running a Korean-stock newsletter and tracking 80 companies. When shareholder meeting season arrives, one person searches DART for meeting notices, another copies over dates and electronic voting availability, and the third writes short explanations of the agenda items.

Even filling just five fields for each company—date, location, electronic voting, agenda title, and deadline status—means 400 fields across 80 companies. When a corrected notice appears, the team must compare it with earlier notes. For an agenda titled something like “partial amendment to the articles of incorporation,” they must reread the original document because the title alone does not explain the change.

This work repeats during the concentrated shareholder meeting season. Late alerts can cause readers to miss a voting-rights record date or an electronic voting period. And because companies use different wording, it is difficult to compare the same type of agenda item side by side.

Once the new data becomes available, the operator first registers the 80 companies of interest. When a new meeting notice arrives, the service retrieves the date, location, electronic voting availability, and agenda classification, then automatically updates a calendar and company pages.

It also becomes possible to collect only agenda items classified as “director election,” or to send alerts only for companies offering electronic voting. If a corrected notice shows only what changed from the earlier values, people do not need to review all 400 fields again.

Human work still remains. Agenda classification is not a recommendation to vote for or against an item. Explaining a candidate’s career history or the legal meaning of an articles-of-incorporation amendment requires reading the original notice alongside other disclosures. Users should always be directed back to the original document to verify important figures and final voting instructions.

Electronic voting is a separate issue as well. Open DART will report whether it is offered, but this plan does not include an actual voting screen, shareholder eligibility verification, or a method for providing voting-period details. It is more realistic to start with a small service that accurately shows schedules, agendas, and links to original documents rather than trying to build voting from day one.

The smallest first product would place shareholder meeting schedules and agendas for 20 tracked companies on one screen, and alert users only about electronic voting availability and corrected notices. That is enough to test whether the cost of finding and transcribing notices has fallen, and whether users actually open the alerts.

Overseas, distribution and voting developed separately

In the United States, Broadridge uses ProxyVote to handle delivery of shareholder meeting materials, online voting, and vote tabulation based on shareholder information held by brokers and banks. It now also bundles virtual shareholder meeting operations.

In materials Broadridge published for 2024, more than 236 million electronic-delivery items related to individual investors were sent, and 97% of the shares voted were processed electronically. It also operated 1,878 virtual shareholder meetings, but the voting participation rate for shares held by individual investors was 29.8%. This figure is from the company’s own compiled data. Lowering delivery costs alone does not solve the participation problem.

B3, Brazil’s stock exchange, lets individual investors view and vote on remote-voting agenda items registered by issuers through an investor portal or mobile app. From January 2025, investors could also send voting instructions directly to B3 without going through a custodian.

According to B3, 60,595 voting instructions were recorded through its investor portal in 2025, up 46.7% from the previous year. This is also the operator’s own count, but it shows that participation behaviour can increase when agenda review and mobile voting are placed in the same flow.

These two cases show that there is no need to build a giant investment platform from the start. Accurate agenda delivery, deadline alerts, and connections to actual voting can be built separately and joined later.

Four things you could build now

1. A shareholder meeting calendar for my stocks

This service shows shareholder meeting dates and agendas for companies a user owns in plain language, and sends electronic-voting availability and deadline alerts. It is for an office worker who has just begun buying Korean stocks and owns roughly five to 20 companies.

A time is coming when small teams can manage many companies because company notices can be collected automatically. The first screen shows cards with the company name, the nearest shareholder meeting date, three key agenda items, and an electronic-voting indicator.

2. An agenda workspace for small asset managers

This service assigns agenda items across team members and records review, decision, and completed-vote status for multiple companies. It is for small asset managers or investment advisers that manage dozens of Korean equities without a dedicated proxy-voting team.

Receiving standardized agenda classifications can first reduce the work of re-entering notices company by company. The first screen combines a date-ordered shareholder meeting calendar with counts for unreviewed items, decisions completed, and votes needing confirmation.

3. A monitor for director elections and articles-of-incorporation changes

This service filters for director election, remuneration-limit, and articles-of-incorporation amendment agenda items, then reports company-level changes and corrections. It is for journalists covering listed-company governance or research staff at civic groups.

Today, company-specific search terms make items easy to miss. Once agendas are classified using the same criteria, the service can narrow the monitoring target automatically. The first screen shows newly published agenda items today, wording changed since the previous day, and links back to the original documents.

4. A listed-company shareholder meeting comparison tool

This service compares shareholder meeting dates, electronic voting adoption, limits on director and auditor remuneration, and major agenda items across companies in the same industry. It is for corporate support or shareholder-affairs staff at a Korea Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (KOSDAQ) listed company, where one or two people prepare for shareholder meetings.

When the cost of re-entering public data falls, peer-company comparison becomes possible without a large research budget. The first screen places the user’s company beside five comparison companies and highlights only the differing fields.

Why this matters where you are

Korea’s planned Open DART data is a Korean regulatory and public-disclosure condition, not a universal data source. In your market, check whether shareholder meeting notices, corrections, agenda classifications, and voting availability can be accessed in a consistent machine-readable format. Even if actual voting requires a separate provider, a product can begin with accurate agenda delivery, deadlines, and links to primary documents.

What to check in 30 minutes today

Open the latest meeting notices for 10 companies you follow in DART. Copy each company’s shareholder meeting date, electronic voting availability, three key agenda items, and correction status into one note. If you cannot finish in 30 minutes, or if wording differs enough across three or more companies to block a decision, automatic collection and standardized classification alone may solve a real problem.