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...
Shareholders Archive
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...
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...
‘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, ...
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 ...
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...
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...
The SEC’s controversial proposal to relieve 89 percent of asset managers from filing quarterly ownership forms could be ‘shelved,’ according to a report from Bloomberg.
The regulator received 2,238 comment letters opposing the change, and only 24 in support of it, according to analysis ...
Just over half of US companies – 52 percent – say their off-season engagement activities translate into increased support when it comes to the proxy vote, according to the latest research from Corporate Secretary sister publication IR Magazine.
The Off-Season Governance report shows that almost two thirds of IR teams have a program of activitie...
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 ...