Richard J. Daly
Analyst · Evercore Partners
One other thing, if it doesn't come back at a point in time, we'd have to take a step back and say okay, even though there's no technical reason that any -- that we can find that any consultant can find or any law firms that service the mutual fund industry can tell us about because we spoke with all of them as well, all right? If it doesn't come back at a point in time, we're going to be looking at this differently. However, we have 2 hedges, even when it does come back. One is that the number of mutual fund positions is still growing, all right? So we don't even need the same percentage of positions to go out the proxy to get to the same number that we're trying to get to a couple of years back. Two, we believe that our offering in the mutual funds space, our optimal proxy offering, is a game changer for mutual funds to achieve quorum. Everyone knows retail investors don't vote at the percentages, that institutional investors vote at, and to get to 51% quorum is generally a tough task. Our optimal proxy product takes advantage of Broadridge's knowledge of how every investor votes. And therefore, rather than going out and selling fear, which is you better be ready to spend a lot of money to call a lot of investors, we go out with a clear knowledge with this new product of how their investors, their actual investors historically vote. So if John Doe never votes, even if he's at a large share position, we're not going to be making phone calls and running up expenses for those funds. If Mary Smith always votes, okay, even though her position may be smaller, okay, we're going to be going after her right away because we know that's likelihood of success. So we're going to be going out there with a model that -- a fixed price model, in essence, that will be higher than what most people would normally bid. But in reality, much lower than what funds normally actually pay. So between position growth and we think we're going to grow our share in solicitation, with a reasonable return, we can get to our historical levels of average revenue, all right, and still not have the market have a complete return.