Proxy and Class actions: Today’s ESG challenge

ISSA recently supported an industry-wide initiative entitled “Proxy Voting & Class Actions: Today’s ESG challenge”. This initiative is designed to collate detailed, statistical information on how and where organizations can support increased and improved shareholder engagement.

In cooperation with The ValueExchange, Goal, FIS and Proxymity, we issued a survey on the topic that garnered many responses amongst several key segments including Issuer and their Agents, Investment Banks, Custodian Banks, Mutual Funds, Hedge Funds and Technology Providers. The Key Findings from the survey can be found here:

The key findings include robust metrics on the effectiveness of the industry’s ability to foster shareholder engagement, including automation of processes, timeliness and costs of communications and getting responses to proxy proposals and class actions from shareholders. Root causes of problem areas are identified as well as areas of investment to address those.

Firms that participated in the survey have the unique opportunity to benchmark their own your own strategy, receiving a customised scorecard for their firm showing their results against those of their industry peers.

The survey’s key findings are also helping ISSA to drive the evolving industry dialogue – with these results feeding directly into the work being undertaken by our Asset Servicing Working Group.

We thank those that participated and hope the survey results are helpful to all ISSA members in their strategic planning around Proxy Voting and Class Actions.