ESG Archive

Rather than getting caught up in a debate over fiduciary duty or whether or not sustainability or ESG performance is material, let’s just cut to the chase on the latest BlackRock letter. It’s still a company’s choice whether to disclose ESG information. If your company is selling a product or a service, you are obviously responding to customer demands and interests. So what about customers buying your stock? If they are increasingly asking for ESG information, how do...

When Betty Liu joined the NYSE in July 2018, she hit the road. In her newly created role as executive vice chairman of the exchange and chief experience officer of parent company Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), she wanted to talk to CEOs of NYSE-listed companies about the value-adds the exchange could provide. During these initial meetings, diversity and board composition emerged as common themes. The CEOs she spoke to ‘had had no issues with wanting to make thei...

AT&T’s ESG reporting team takes a two-fold approach to managing relationships with ESG data providers, by actively engaging with analysts and producing 20 topic-specific ESG reports. Several issuers expressed concerns about the accuracy of third-party ESG data at last month’s ESG Integration Forum, but Ben Kruse, director of global CSR reporting a...

The number of requests that institutional investors receive for meetings outside of proxy season continues to rise, as IR, legal and sustainability teams are encouraged to work together on off-season ESG engagement. Speaking to IR Magazine and Corporate Secretary at the ESG Integration Forum – US 2019 in December, Daniel Oh said the institutional investors he talked to in December were receiving unprecedented levels of issuer outreach before the holidays....