Shareholders Archive

Shareholders

Proxy campaign outlook: What’s in the activists’ playbook for 2021?

Jan 13, 2021
Alexandra Higgins
Bruce Goldfarb
Proxy campaign outlook: What’s in the activists’ playbook for 2021?
Looking ahead at 2021, corporate management teams will be facing a very different operating environment from the one that prevailed through most of 2020. While the availability of Covid-19 vaccines may allow the economy to return to something akin to normalcy, some changes accelerated by the coronavirus – such as working from home, increased digitization of commerce and shifts in consumer behavior – will leave a lasting impact on businesses. At the same time, a heighte...
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Shareholders

Bank of America's year-round holistic shareholder engagement

Jan 06, 2021
Ben Ashwell
Bank of America's year-round holistic shareholder engagement
At Bank of America, shareholder engagement is well established and supported across the executive and non-executive teams. For many governance teams, engagement is now a year-round activity, and it therefore helps to have such a broad team involved, including the company’s vice chair, chief human resources officer, global general counsel, head of investor relations, global ESG executive and corporate secretary. In addition, the company benefits from robust partici...
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Shareholders

The story behind HP’s award-winning AGM

Dec 23, 2020
Ben Maiden
The story behind HP’s award-winning AGM
HP’s 2020 virtual AGM was not its first rodeo – the company has been holding its annual shareholder meetings online since 2015. But there was a wrinkle: HP was the subject of a proxy contest and hostile tender offer brought by Xerox Corporation. HP was planning to hold an in-person AGM in late spring because of the technical and procedural limitations associated with a proxy contest, which typically do not allow the issue to be resolved via a virtual meeting. HP...
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Shareholders

PepsiCo finds governance success through evolution

Dec 18, 2020
Ben Maiden
PepsiCo finds governance success through evolution
‘Leadership across the board’ is how one of the Corporate Secretary judges describes PepsiCo’s governance team, which has looked to move the ball forward in a variety of areas over the past year or so. One of those areas is improving the proxy statement. When putting together the 2020 version, the governance team drew on investor feedback to focus on six areas: (1) board composition, diversity and refreshment, and leadership structure; (2) long-term strategy, ...
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Shareholders

Starting a new governance journey at Nuance

Dec 18, 2020
Ben Maiden
Starting a new governance journey at Nuance
Wendy Cassity, executive vice president and chief legal officer at Nuance Communications, joined the company in late 2018 with a mandate to bring about a major overhaul of the company’s governance. And Cassity and her new, hand-picked team have delivered just that. As the company says in its submission: ‘Nuance was ready for change. After years of stagnant growth and unresponsive management, there was nowhere to go but up.’ Just 8 percent of votes cast ...
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Shareholders

Corporate access teams playing role in off-season engagement

Dec 17, 2020
Ben Ashwell
Corporate access teams playing role in off-season engagement
As off-season shareholder engagement continues to rise, buy-side corporate access teams are stepping in to assist with the meetings – either formally or informally. For most issuers, there has been a sharp increase in investor meetings this year as the ease of virtual conferencing has played a part. This engagement has carried through to the off-season, when governance professionals and board directors tend to meet with the stewardship and responsible investment t...
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Shareholders

Comment: Take care when considering buybacks

Dec 10, 2020
Allen He and Sarah Keohane Williamson
Comment: Take care when considering buybacks
Buybacks have undergone a meteoric rise since the turn of the 21st century, overtaking dividends as the preferred means to return capital to shareholders in many countries. In 2019 alone, firms spent more than $1.2 trillion globally on buybacks. Buybacks are controversial, however, with academics, practitioners and politicians all maligning their use. At its most basic level, buying back shares can be a technical capital allocation tool and an attractive alternative...
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Shareholders

CII criticizes DoL fiduciary voting proposal

Oct 06, 2020
Ben Maiden
CII criticizes DoL fiduciary voting proposal
The Council of Institutional Investors (CII) has urged the US government to drop a plan the group says would muzzle Employee Retirement Income Security Act (Erisa) plan participants. The US Department of Labor (DoL) on August 31 proposed a rule addressing the application of the prudence and exclusive purpose duties under Erisa ...
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