institutional investors

BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street bulk up governance staff

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street have expanded their corporate governance teams significantly in response to growing pressure from policymakers and clients to demonstrate they are policing the companies they invest in.The move by the world’s three largest asset managers, which together control nearly $11tn of assets, will help address fears that investors are not doing enough to monitor controversial issues around executive pay and board diversity at the companies they invest in.

Source: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street bulk up governance staff

Are Fund Managers Pushing Back on CEO Pay?

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

Financial Times notes:

[T]here are tangible signs that a growing number of investors are taking action to rein in excessive pay for company bosses. The consensus is that pressure from the public, politicians and clients have combined to put pressure on the investment industry to prove it is willing to push back on egregious pay packages.

Graeme Griffiths, a director at Principles for Responsible Investment, a UN­backed organisation whose members oversee a collective $62tn of assets, says: “Society is calling on fund managers to be more engaged. The public is now more aware of [wealth inequalities] than they were before.

“There has been a lot of academic research, news coverage and changes in the political landscape that have increased scrutiny of the differentials between those in well [paid] positions in the corporate arena versus those in more typical jobs. [Asset managers] are certainly partly responsible for this divergence over a long period of time.”

BlackRock, which was urged to toughen its voting approachurged to toughen its voting approach after approving 97 per cent of US pay resolutions in the 12 months to the end of June 2015, this year urged the CEOs of the UK’s largest companies to ensure salary increases for executives did not outpace those for average workers.

The world’s largest asset manager was also slightly less lenient on pay in the US last year, approving 96 per cent of remuneration reports in the 12 months to the end of June 2016, according to figures compiled for the FT by Proxy Insight, the data provider.

BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink additionally wroteLarry Fink additionally wrote to the heads of large global companies this year warning them that BlackRock would not “hesitate to exercise our right to vote against . . . misaligned executive compensation”.

50/50 Climate Project Shows Conflicts Skew Proxy Voting Decisions

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

Ross Kerber reports at Reuters:

Several big fund firms supported challenges on executive pay or climate disclosures less frequently where they had business ties to energy companies and utilities, according to a new study released on Tuesday.

The scrutiny of firms including Vanguard Group and Invesco Ltd is the latest research to raise questions about how well they manage potential conflicts of interest when casting proxy votes at the same time they are trying to win work like running corporate retirement plans….For its study 50/50 reviewed how fund firms voted on 27 proxy questions last year at oil and gas companies and utilities, tracking how often they voted against management recommendations.

At Vanguard, for instance, 50/50 found the $4 trillion Pennsylvania index fund manager broke from management 22 percent of the time. But at four companies where Vanguard serviced retirement plans, its funds did not support any challenges….Another fund firm, Invesco, broke with management 12 percent of the time, and at none of seven companies where it had business ties.

Kerber’s article includes more information and responses from the managers included, denying that the votes are influenced by conflicts. The full report is on the 50/50 website.

[T]he 50/50 Climate Project found that the managers who tended to vote in favor of management received more in fees and stewarded more assets than all other managers combined, and that their voting practices were even more management friendly at companies with which they had business relationships.

Report from the CII Winter meeting: ESG

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

ESG stands for what used to be termed “non-financial” metrics: environment, social concerns like diversity and treatment of employees, and corporate governance issues like CEO pay and board independence. Institutional investors, skeptical of traditional financial measures following the Enron/WorldCom era scandals, the dot.com bubble, and the financial meltdown, are increasingly relying on non-traditional measures to help them evaluate risk and return in their portfolio investments. Wall Street securities analysts may fixate on quarterly returns, but large institutional investors investing pension money are concerned about the long term, and they understand how misleading the traditional metrics, based on accounting principles developed in the 19th century, can be.

One of the opening sessions featured an interview with Hiromichi Mizuno, head of Japan’s $1.3 trillion government pension fund, who supervised the transition of the fund from all-Japanese investments to deployment of half of its capital in stocks around the world. “Through that process, I came to realize that the best way to improve our performance was to focus on stewardship in investing,” he said. He was inspired by a meeting with former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who asked him “why Japan was so indifferent on environment and social issues. I thought Japan was the most environmentally friendly and inclusive country, but we had never stepped up internationally.”

Mizuno told the group that they have a 100-year sustainable investment scheme with a 25-year investment horizon. They are “the textbook definition of a universal owner” with near-permanent holdings in just about every publicly traded company. Investment restrictions and transaction costs make selling out of any individual stock impossible, so the only alternative is engagement with corporate managers to make sure their strategy is sustainable over the long term.

Mizuno “expects best in class stewardship from our asset managers,” which means they will reduce their business with those who fall short and are willing to pay more for managers who can show they effective exercise of ownership rights like proxy voting and communication with executives and directors. Regardless of any short-term adjustments a particular government may make to the rules around climate change, Mizuno’s fund will ask whether the business model is sustainable, not over the course of one administration but over the next 25 years.

The panel on “Next Generation Investing” echoed this focus on sustainability. State Street Global Advisors’ Chris McKnett told the group that “there are risks and opportunities that can be overlooked by confining yourself to traditional analysis.” And one of those opportunities is appealing to the millennials who will control as much as $7 trillion in investable capital in the next five years. The “client careabouts” they have identified for that group include a strong interest in sustainability. As Morgan Stanley’s Thomas Kamei put it, “I’m already voting my dollars as a consumer. Why wouldn’t I want to invest that way as well?” The information he wants to see on sustainability will connect it to tax consequences and free cash flow.

Another panel examined the push for better financial disclosures on climate impact and sustainability, including guidelines and proposals from GRI, IFRS, SASB, and TCFD, which are filling in the gaps left by GAAP. “Climate has become a systemic risk,” said Paul Lee of Aberdeen Asset Management. The panel agreed that they want to see climate risk reflected in financial statements, whether the business is direct, as with fossil fuels and beachfront property, or indirect, as with the banks and insurance companies that do business with the enterprises with a more central connection to climate issues. Fortunately, the sustainability reports are less often being written by the marketing department, and becoming the province of the same people who are responsible for other financial reports.

Anne Simpson, the highly influential representative of CalPERS, said, “The financial case around risk is powerful….And this is what the economy needs. Sustainable businesses create jobs and growth.” She noted that Exxon responded to her fund’s shareholder initiative by adding an atmospheric scientist to its board for the first time. Simpson appreciates the Paris accords as a roadmap for investors and companies, no matter what happens in the US. “We’re not changing course because one country is doing certain things,” said Neil Hawkins, Dow Chemical’s Chief Sustainability Officer. Like the CFA Institute’s Rebecca Fender, who called this movement “a slow-moving but unstoppable train,” the CII members consider climate change a material investment risk and opportunity that they must understand and respond to.

Large institutional investors are permanent owners of stock, many of them through index funds that track the market as a whole. That means their only opportunity for protecting and enhancing returns is by pushing the management and boards of those companies to do better over the long term. “We own the best stock and the worst stock,” said McKnett. “Why wouldn’t we want to make the worst stock a little less worst?”

The 100 Most Overpaid CEOs: Are Fund Managers Asleep at the Wheel? New Webinar and Report from As You Sow

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

The 100 Most Overpaid CEOs: Are Fund Managers Asleep at The Wheel? from As You Sow on Vimeo.

From the report, which can be downloaded here:

According to the Economic Policy Institute, “CEO pay grew an astounding 943% over the past 37 years, greatly outpacing the growth in the cost of living, the productivity of the economy, and the stock market, disproving the claim that the growth in CEO pay reflects the ‘performance’ of the company, the value of its stock, or the ability of the CEO to do anything but disproportionately raise the amount of his pay.”

For the past two years we have highlighted the 100 most overpaid CEOs of S&P 500 companies, and the votes of large shareholders, including mutual funds and pension funds on their pay packages.

What has changed since the first report? Not much. Executive pay has continued to increase. Although mutual funds and pension funds are doing better at exercising their fiduciary responsibility by more frequently voting their proxies against some of the most outrageous CEO pay packages. Of the mutual funds with the largest changes in voting habits from last year, all of them opposed more of the pay packages than they had the prior year.

As we noted in our prior reports, the system in place to govern corporations has failed in the area of executive compensation. Like all the best governance systems, corporate governance relies on a balance of power. That system envisions directors representing shareholders and guarding the company’s assets from waste. It also envisions shareholders

This governance system comes from a time when it was assumed that unhappy investors would simply sell their stakes if sufficiently dissatisfied with the governance of a company. It reflects a time when there were fewer intermediaries between beneficial holders and corporate executives. However, today more and more investors own shares through mutual funds, often investing in S&P 500 index funds. Individual investors are not in a position to sell their stakes in a specific company. The funds themselves are subject to a number of conflicts of interest and to what economists refer to with the oxymoronic-sounding term “rational apathy,” to reflect the expense of oversight in comparison to a pro rata share of any benefits.

The pay packages analyzed in this report belong to the CEOs of companies that the majority of retirement funds are invested in.

Today, those casting the votes on the behalf of shareholders frequently do not represent the shareholders’ interests.

CEO compensation as it is currently structured does not work; rather than incentivize sustainable company growth, compensation plans increase disproportionately by every measure. Too often CEOs are rewarded for mergers and acquisitions instead of improving company performance. As noted in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, “Those [compensation] systems encouraged the big bet – where the payoff on the upside could be huge and the downside [for the individual executive] limited. This was the case up and down the line – from the corporate boardroom to the mortgage broker on the street.”2 We note that the downside, which could include such features as environmental costs, may be limited for the individual, and instead borne by the larger society.

Paying one individual EXCESSIVE amounts of money can lead people to make the false assumption that such compensation is justified and earned. It undermines essential premises of capitalism: the robust ‘invisible hand’ of the market as well as the confidence of those who entrust capital to third parties. Confusing disclosure coupled with inappropriate comparisons are then used to justify similar packages elsewhere. These systems perpetuate and exaggerate the destabilizing effects of income inequality, and may contribute to the stagnating pay of frontline employees.

As the report is now in its third year, we have the ability to look back and see what happened to the companies identified in our report two years ago. We’ve been saying the most overpaid CEOs under-deliver for shareholders. In examining this data from the following two years of our report, we have found dramatic results— not only does the group of 100 most overpaid CEO companies of the S&P 500 underperform the S&P 500 by 2.9 percentage points, but the firms with the 10 most overpaid CEOs underperformed the S&P 500 index by an amazing 10.5 percentage points and actually had a negative return, reducing the actual value of the companies’ shares by 5.7 percent. In summary, the firms with the most overpaid CEO’s devastated shareholder value since our first report published in February 2015.

Identifying the 100 most overpaid CEOs in the S&P 500 was our purpose in writing this report. In undertaking this project we focused not just on absolute dollars, but also on the practices we believe to have contributed to bloated compensation packages.

Shareholders now supposedly have the right, since the enactment of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, to cast an advisory vote on compensation packages. However, in today’s world, most shareholders have their shares held and voted by a financial intermediary. This means that this critical responsibility is in the hands of a fiduciary at a mutual fund, an ETF, a pension fund, a financial manager, or people whose full time job is to analyze the activities of the companies they invest in and monitor the performance of their boards, their CEOs, and their compensation.

A key element of the report has been to analyze how mutual funds and pension funds voted on these pay packages. This year we vastly expanded the list of funds we looked at. In response to excessive and problematic CEO pay packages, it should be noted that every fund manager has the power to vote against these compensation plans and withhold votes for the members of the board’s compensation committee who created and approved them. In some cases, institutional investors should request meetings with members of the compensation committees to express their concerns. Institutional investors should be prepared to explain their votes on executive pay to their customers, and individuals should hold their mutual funds accountable for such decisions by expressing their displeasure directly to those that are also well compensated to protect and represent them.

 

 

 

Funds ‘Rubber-Stamp’ CEO Pay Slightly Less Often: Report | Bloomberg BNA

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

Shareholder activism and public pressure around executive compensation may be having an effect on how mutual funds vote on pay packages at companies they invest in.Mutual fund giants such as BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group have been called out by shareholder advocates in the past for “rubber-stamping” pay plans, but research from As You Sow shows they are voting against compensation deemed excessive a bit more often.The shareholder advocacy group came up with a list of 100 chief executive officers in the S&P 500 whose pay it considered too high based on financial performance and other factors. It then looked at voting records across 25 mutual fund families and found that average support for “overpaid” CEOs has declined somewhat, from 82 percent to 76 percent, over the past year.

Source: Funds ‘Rubber-Stamp’ CEO Pay Slightly Less Often: Report | Bloomberg BNA

New York City pension system to analyze carbon footprint | Reuters

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

New York City’s $170.6 billion pension system will analyze its carbon footprint for the first time amid concerns of potential investment risks from companies that fail to adapt to climate change, its custodian said in a statement on Thursday.<P

Trustees for the five funds that make up the system selected Mercer Investment Consulting LLC to determine how to incorporate “the realities of global warming” into asset allocation, manager selection and risk management, said New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, custodian for the system.

Four of the funds – including for police and firefighters – also chose Trucost plc to perform a carbon footprint analysis of public equity investments.That study involves measuring actual and estimated greenhouse gas emissions that can be attributed to an investment portfolio and, proportionally, to its holdings.

Mercer will conduct a carbon footprint analysis for the remaining fund, the Teachers Retirement System. The reviews are expected to be completed by the end of 2017.The city’s funds have previously taken other measures to address concerns about climate change and related investment risks, as have public pensions and other institutional investors around the world.

The $184.5 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund, the third largest in the country, last month became the first major U.S. public pension to join the Portfolio Decarbonization Coalition.

Source: New York City pension system to analyze carbon footprint | Reuters

Leading Investors Launch Historic Initiative Focused on U.S. Institutional Investor Stewardship and Corporate Governance

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

The Investor Stewardship Group, a collective of some of the largest U.S.-based institutional investors and global asset managers, along with several of their international counterparts, today announced the launch of the Framework for U.S. Stewardship and Governance, a historic, sustained initiative to establish a framework of basic standards of investment stewardship and corporate governance for U.S. institutional investor and boardroom conduct.

The Investor Stewardship Group represents some $17 trillion in assets under management, largely comprising the retirement and long-term savings of millions of individual investors around the world, and is being led by the senior corporate governance practitioners at institutional investor and investment management firms. At launch, the Investor Stewardship Group comprises BlackRock, CalSTRS, Florida State Board of Administration (SBA), GIC Private Limited (Singapore’s Sovereign Wealth Fund), Legal and General Investment Management, MFS Investment Management, MN Netherlands, PGGM, Royal Bank of Canada (Asset Management), State Street Global Advisors, TIAA Investments, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., ValueAct Capital, Vanguard, Washington State Investment Board, and Wellington Management.“

In markets around the world, there are well-established governance and stewardship codes. The Investor Stewardship Group’s goal is to codify the fundamentals of good corporate governance and establish baseline expectations for U.S. corporations and their institutional shareholders,” said Anne Sheehan, Director of Corporate Governance at the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. “The Group brings all types of investors together and enables us to speak with one voice on these fundamental issues.”The initial standards focus on corporate governance principles for listed companies and investment stewardship principles for institutional investors. Taken together, the standards form a framework for promoting long-term value creation for U.S. companies and the broader U.S. economy.

“This initiative reveals the depth and breadth of agreement amongst institutional investors,” said Rakhi Kumar, Managing Director and Head of Asset Stewardship at State Street Global Advisors. “The stewardship principles encourage all investors to take responsibility for owning the stewardship process and being accountable to those whose assets they manage. We encourage all institutional investors to join the Investor Stewardship Group to further these corporate governance and stewardship principles.

”The Framework is the result of a two-year effort by a broad range of investors. As an ongoing, dynamic effort, the Investor Stewardship Group is calling on every institutional investor and asset management firm investing in the U.S. to sign the Framework at http://www.isgframework.org.

Noted Glenn Booraem, Principal & Fund Treasurer at Vanguard, “We believe that the principles detailed in the Framework will further the productive dialogue and, most importantly, continue to drive positive change among institutional investors and the companies in which they invest. By articulating this set of shared behavioral expectations, we seek to promote our common objectives to create sustainable, long-term value for all shareholders.”

The Framework goes into effect January 1, 2018 to give U.S. companies time to adjust to its standards in advance of the 2018 proxy season.

The Framework’s principles are as follows (for additional information on these principles, please visit http://www.isgframework.org):

STEWARDSHIP PRINCIPLES FOR INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS1:

Principle A: Institutional investors are accountable to those whose money they invest.

Principle B: Institutional investors should demonstrate how they evaluate corporate governance factors with respect to the companies in which they invest.

Principle C: Institutional investors should disclose, in general terms, how they manage potential conflicts of interest that may arise in their proxy voting and engagement activities.

Principle D: Institutional investors are responsible for proxy voting decisions and should monitor the relevant activities and policies of third parties that advise them on those decisions.

Principle E: Institutional investors should address and attempt to resolve differences with companies in a constructive and pragmatic manner.

Source: Leading Investors Launch Historic Initiative Focused on U.S. Institutional Investor Stewardship and Corporate Governance

State Street Asks About Sustainability

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

State Street Global Advisors has written to the board members of its portfolio companies to ask about “issues [that] can have a material impact on a company’s ability to generate returns,” including sustainability.

As one of the largest asset managers in the world, we have an important responsibility to the millions of individuals who entrust their financial futures to us through retirement plans, endowments and foundations, financial intermediaries, and sovereign institutions. Our mission is to invest responsibly on their behalf to enable economic prosperity and social progress over the long term. We believe that a focus on ESG issues is a critical requirement for us to deliver against that mission. At the same time, we recognize that companies through sound management and effective, independent board oversight are in the best position to determine what will create long-term value for shareholders. Therefore, as always our focus will be on process and approach rather than rules and “litmus tests.”

Of particular interest is the board’s assessment of climate change with regard to its own impact and the impact climate change has on its supply chain and product development.

Since 2014, climate change has been a priority engagement issue for us because of its potential to impact long-term results. Last year we created a framework to help boards capture and evaluate  different kinds of physical, regulatory and economic risks associated with climate change within specific sectors. We have provided detailed guidance as to how we assess a company’s evaluation of climate risk and its preparedness for addressing it. We have also sought to ensure that our voting record aligns with the priorities we have communicated to our portfolio companies. While we make case-by-case decisions when voting proxies, we will support climate resolutions if companies’ disclosure, practices and board governance structures are found to be inadequate. That was the rationale behind our votes in 2016.

 

Comments on Marty Lipton’s “New Paradigm” of Corporate Governance

Posted on by ValueEdge blog staff

The leading lawyer representing corporate insiders is Martin Lipton of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. On Harvard Law School’s Corporate Governance blog, he has written an article with his thoughts for corporate directors in 2017. He begins by acknowledging the “evolution” in corporate governance with some respect, though not acknowledging those responsible, either the corporate managers who behaved badly or the institutional investors who objected. And then he creates a straw man of some imagined disconnect between creation of shareholder value and providing competitive and societally worthwhile goods and services.

The evolution of corporate governance over the last three decades has produced meaningful changes in the expectations of shareholders and the business policies adopted to meet those expectations. Decision-making power has shifted away from industrialists, entrepreneurs and builders of businesses, toward greater empowerment of institutional investors, hedge funds and other financial managers. As part of this shift, there has been an overriding emphasis on measures of shareholder value, with the success or failure of businesses judged based on earnings per share, total shareholder return and similar financial metrics. Only secondary importance is given to factors such as customer satisfaction, technological innovations and whether the business has cultivated a skilled and loyal workforce.

He says that long-term institutional investors, with other stakeholders can be a stabilizing force to shield corporate executives from attacks by activists, and he acknowledges that the best protection from activists is a record of performance and credible commitment to long-term shareholder value. The most significant “evolution” here may be his admission that activists can be an essential market response to failing strategies.

To be clear, the new paradigm does not foreclose activism or prevent institutional investors from supporting an activist initiative where warranted. Underperforming companies may be able to benefit from better board oversight, fresh perspectives in the boardroom, new management expertise and/or a change in strategic direction. Responsible and selective activism can be a useful tool to hold such companies accountable and propel changes to enhance firm value, and institutional investors can benefit from the budget and appetite of activists who drive such reforms. However, the new paradigm seeks to restore a balanced playing field, so that activism is focused on improving companies that are truly mismanaged and underperforming, rather than on using financial engineering indiscriminately against all companies in an effort to boost short-term stock prices.

NOTE: Lipton’s New Paradigm is explained in detail in a document prepared for the World Economic Forum