Broadridge Financial's Rich Daly gives you mail

For a guy who built his company around being anonymous, Rich Daly is surprisingly eager to get you to know its name.

As chief executive of Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc., Daly presides over a $2-billion-a-year enterprise with about 2,000 full-time employees on Long Island alone.

In a gravelly New York accent, he speaks passionately about the fact that the firm, a spinoff from data processor ADP, chose the Island as its headquarters.

To gauge how intense Daly is, it helps to know that at age 9 he borrowed a friend's working papers to pose as a 12-year-old so he could deliver Newsday after school in Cambria Heights in the 1960s.

"I took that route from 17 to 100 papers," he says. And he was no pushover. Customers trying to sneak home without paying for the week's papers would get a surprise. "I'd hide behind garbage cans, and I'd get paid," he says. "I bought my first car with that paper route."

If you own shares of stock or mutual funds, you probably have gotten mail from Daly's company. This year it will send out more than a billion pieces of mail, including millions of proxies to be returned to a Farmingdale post office box.

The catch is that the mail arrives with no mention of Broadridge. It comes, often in blue plastic covers, in the name of brokers like Merrill Lynch and Charles Schwab.

Daly's strategy was to be an "undisclosed agent" for big firms who wouldn't want their customers to think a third party was the one communicating with them.

In 1986 he broke with his partners at proxy firm Independent Election and, when his non-compete clause expired, developed his company.

Beginning with what today is a laughably inadequate personal computer, which sits on display in the lobby of a Broadridge building, Daly and a programming expert developed new software.

He got ADP to buy his venture, which succeeded so well that it bought out Independent Election in 1992. Daly stayed on with ADP.

When ADP spun off Broadridge last year, the new company chose Lake Success over New Jersey as its headquarters. Daly says the firm received state incentives to stay on Long Island, where Broadridge uses about a million square feet of space in four Edgewood buildings.

Corporate upheaval can drive business for Broadridge. If Microsoft's bid for Yahoo goes to a shareholder vote, Daly's company would benefit. Yet, if the two companies ultimately merge, the number of shareholders might decline, costing Broadridge some business.

In general, its ideal scenario is a corporate spinoff, which generates a larger total number of shareholders for the old and new companies.

Yet Daly takes pains to point out that proxies are now only a part of Broadridge's business. It handles many other communications between companies and shareholders, and provides brokerage statements, trade confirmations and stock clearance services.

"Anybody can put something in an envelope," Daly says. "The real key to this business that we've evolved into is that we're the plumbing that connects the 800 largest financial institutions, and the 100 million active accounts behind them, to every active company in North America, and the only way to get from one place to the other is to go through this plumbing." Daly claims a 90 percent share of the investor communications market.

That plumbing means Broadridge has to communicate electronically as well as through the mail. Companies now can make voting available to shareholders through the Internet rather than on paper - unless the shareholder specifically opts out and insists on paper.

At 54, Daly says he works seven days a week and dines out many nights with Wall Street executives, keeping in touch with the people whose businesses will determine his company's future.

These are scary times on Wall Street, where Bear Stearns, one of Broadridge's customers whose shares sold for more than $150 a year ago, was bought out for $2 a share last week to save it from ruin. "I'm shocked and saddened by the whole thing," Daly says.

His company is in control of its business, he says, but not of "the markets we serve." But it's hard to control your business if your customers are in trouble. Broadridge's stock ended last week at $18.22 a share, below its $19.70 initial price and nearly $6 below its high.

Still, Daly is upbeat, saying markets have always bounced back, eventually, and gone higher.

Cambria Heights' former star paper boy, who now lives on the North Shore of Nassau County, says he likes to tell employees, "Believe in yourself. Believe you can make a difference ... life without passion is a crime."