A shareholder vote is a wonderfully tidy object. One box says yes. Another says no. The deadline is printed in sensible type. Somewhere behind that little ballot, however, sits an unruly population of investors with different habits, different holdings and a shared ability to ignore the mail. Jocelyn McBride has built a career in the distance between the tidy object and the unruly reality.
McBride is Co-Chief Executive Officer of Sodali & Co Fund Solutions, the part of the advisory firm that works with mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and closed-end funds on governance and proxy solicitation. Her job belongs to a corner of finance that is easy to overlook and difficult to improvise. A proposal may be carefully drafted. The board may be ready. The shareholder meeting may already be on the calendar. None of that produces a quorum by magic.
For more than 25 years, McBride has advised fund companies on the shareholder-meeting vote. She has worked as an analyst and advisor on major, complex proxy projects. The task is part arithmetic, part communications and part anthropology. Who owns the shares? How has that group voted before? Which message is relevant? Which channel will be noticed? How many people must act, and how quickly, for the meeting to do what meetings are meant to do?
A career built behind the ballot
McBride began at The Palmer Group, a venture capital firm founded by a former dean of the Wharton School. It was an early view of finance from the side of judgment and relationships. She then moved into proxy services, including work at ADP Proxy Services, before becoming a vice president at D.F. King. The name carries history in the solicitation business, where victory is usually measured less by applause than by whether enough valid instructions arrive on time.
At Computershare, she spent nearly two decades in senior sales and product-development positions, ultimately serving as Executive Vice President at Computershare Fund Services. A 2018 industry guide listed her as the executive responsible for sales and described the method behind a fund campaign: analyze the shareholder base, estimate participation by segment, build a project plan and keep revising it while the clock runs. It is a practical craft. The glamorous part, if one insists upon finding one, is precision.
The invisible campaign behind a visible vote
This work makes a useful correction to the popular picture of corporate governance. Governance is often discussed in large nouns - accountability, stewardship, democracy. Proxy solicitation has to translate those nouns into verbs. Find. Explain. Call. Remind. Count. A theoretically open process is of little use when the people entitled to participate never quite get around to it.
“I am pleased to be joining the firm at such a pivotal time in the fund industry.”Jocelyn McBride, on joining Morrow Sodali Fund Solutions in 2024
The reunion at Fund Solutions
In March 2024, McBride joined what was then called Morrow Sodali Fund Solutions as co-CEO. She was paired with Vin Di Costa, who had led the business since its 2019 launch as Di Costa Partners. The appointment carried the pleasant efficiency of a reunion: McBride and Di Costa had worked together before. She arrived with the relationships of a long practitioner and a brief focused on leading mutual fund and ETF managers.
Her public comment at the time was compact. The fund industry was at a pivotal moment; the existing operation had established momentum; her experience could help extend it. There was no executive fog machine. The appeal was continuity plus accumulated knowledge, which in a specialist business can be a better growth plan than novelty wearing a bright tie.
The partnership also makes intuitive sense for a field built on checks, forecasts and judgment calls. Co-leadership is another form of consultation. Fund Solutions serves clients through market analysis, governance guidance, ownership profiling, communications planning and solicitation execution. Each function informs the next. The leader who understands the vote solely as an endpoint has arrived several chapters late.
Associate at venture capital firm The Palmer Group, followed by work in proxy services.
Vice President at D.F. King.
Senior sales and product-development leadership at Computershare, culminating in an executive vice president role.
Appointed Co-Chief Executive Officer of the Fund Solutions business.
Appointed Co-Chair of Nicsa's Membership Committee while serving on its board.
Participation is the product
McBride's 2026 appointment as Co-Chair of Nicsa's Membership Committee looks, at first, like a second lane. Nicsa connects professionals across asset and wealth management. Its membership committee is charged with making those connections useful, widening participation and sustaining the community. Yet the assignment is closely related to her daily work. Both begin with the same inconvenient truth: having a constituency does not mean the constituency will engage.
In accepting the position, McBride emphasized diverse perspectives, a stronger member experience, growth of the Nicsa community and broader participation. These are association goals stated in association language, but behind them is a proxy practitioner's instinct. Invitations need architecture. People need a reason to respond. A community, much like a shareholder meeting, becomes representative only when its members choose to show up.
Nicsa also lists McBride among its directors, alongside executives from asset managers, banks, consultancies and service providers. That network matters. Fund operations are conducted through a dense ecosystem of boards, managers, intermediaries, lawyers, technology firms and advisors. No single participant sees the entire chain. A trade association is one of the few rooms where the chain can talk to itself.
“As our industry evolves, Nicsa's commitment to diverse perspectives and meaningful engagement is more important than ever.”Jocelyn McBride, June 2026
The useful stubbornness of specialists
The mechanics of shareholder voting keep changing. Communication moves from paper to email and portals. Ownership structures grow more complicated. Funds multiply, combine and reorganize. Investors become easier to reach in theory and harder to arrest in practice. An inbox can deliver a proxy in a second and bury it one second later.
The specialist survives these changes by caring about the dull questions with unusual persistence. Was the ownership file clean? Did the forecast reflect this particular fund? Can the investor understand what is being asked? Is the call program proportionate? What happens if the first wave underperforms? None of these questions makes for a thrilling movie. Collectively, they decide whether governance works on schedule.
They also explain why sales and product development were not detours in McBride's career. In a service this specialized, the product is partly a method and partly the confidence that the method will hold under pressure. Selling it requires understanding the client's anxiety. Developing it requires noticing where the process creates friction. A missed assumption in a forecast can become an expensive week of outreach; an unclear message can make a perfectly reachable investor decline to act. The executive who has lived in both disciplines can connect a promise made in the meeting room with the system expected to deliver it.
Her Los Angeles base adds another small clue to the shape of the role. The Fund Solutions business serves U.S. registered funds within a firm organized across financial centers. The work travels by data room, conference call and campaign dashboard, but relationships still carry memory. McBride's appointment announcement made a point of her strategic relationships, and Nicsa later highlighted her commitment to building professional ones. In an industry full of formal procedures, familiarity has practical value. It shortens the distance between a problem being noticed and somebody trusted enough to receive the call.
McBride's path from analyst and advisor to executive gives the work a human scale. Expertise here is cumulative. One campaign teaches the oddities of another. One shareholder population refuses to behave like the model, and the next model improves. One communication falls flat, and the next is written with greater respect for attention. The career compounds because the lessons do.
There is also something quietly democratic in choosing this specialty. Shareholder participation is imperfect, mediated and often technical. Still, the process rests on a simple promise: people with a right to vote should have a usable chance to exercise it. McBride's business lives in the practical defense of that promise - less marble hall, more spreadsheet; fewer speeches, more follow-up calls.
What the ballot is really asking
By the time the shareholder sees two boxes, the campaign has already asked dozens of harder questions. Do we know whom we are addressing? Have we explained the matter plainly? Have we chosen channels people trust? Have we allowed enough time? Have we earned attention rather than merely demanded it?
Those questions now run through both of McBride's public roles. At Sodali & Co, they shape fund votes. At Nicsa, they shape membership and community. The details differ, but the operating idea holds: participation is not a decorative value placed in a mission statement. It is a result produced through careful design and durable relationships.
A yes-or-no ballot may be tidy. The people behind it remain gloriously otherwise. McBride has spent a career respecting the difference.