NatWest Group plc Shareholder Event 28 Nov 2024

Shareholder Engagement – NatWest is becoming a role model for other listed companies to follow 

NatWest has announced a Virtual Shareholder Event at 6:00pm on Thursday 28 November 2024 for individual investors. 

The event offers an opportunity for you to join Chair, Rick Haythornthwaite, and CEO, Paul Thwaite, and ask them questions. 

NatWest (formerly RBS) now delivers a series of events for individual shareholders. The AGM is typically in late April/early May, preceded by a virtual shareholder event, giving investors the opportunity to ask questions before the AGM and make informed voting decisions. 

ShareSoc launched a Campaign focused on RBS’s governance in 2016 because we felt that the then directors of RBS were not engaging with, or listening to the company’s shareholders. At that time, RBS had abandoned its regional shareholder meetings.  

ShareSoc submitted a shareholder resolution for the creation of a formal Shareholder Committee. Full details of the campaign, which was long and strenuous, are on the campaign page on our website.  

We paused this campaign in 2019, because RBS had started to engage better with shareholders and had announced a programme of 4 events a year specifically focussed on engagement with individual shareholders.  

This has been a successful campaign. Notable achievements: 

1. We were able to successfully requisition 3 resolutions at two AGMs. 
2. Although we did not get shareholders to vote in favour of a Shareholder Committee, we feel that RBS would not have implemented its new shareholder engagement programme without our intervention. 
3. Significant press coverage and wider profile of ShareSoc. 
4. The campaign facilitated meetings with key opinion formers and highlighted the inadequacies of many engagements between companies and their shareholders and fund managers. 
5. Many FSTE100 companies have now introduced Shareholder Engagement Meetings and we are pressing more companies to do so.