Voting Policy Gateway
Explore the range of voting policies and proxy voting services we offer to support your fiduciary duties and stewardship goals related to voting—including custom voting policy development and support.
Our Global Voting Principles
The ISS STOXX Global Voting Principles inform our approach to developing recommendations under our benchmark and thematic voting policies are based on four key tenets: accountability, stewardship, independence, and transparency.
Our Benchmark Voting Policies
Our Benchmark Voting Polices are designed to provide analyses and recommendations that are consistent with our Global Voting Principles covering four key tenets of accountability, stewardship, independence and transparency. Our Global Voting Principles assist institutional investors in meeting their fiduciary requirements with respect to voting by promoting long-term shareholder value creation and risk mitigation by reference to responsible global corporate governance practices. Our Benchmark Policy voting guidelines vary by market, and region, and consider how corporate governance practices respect shareholder rights and provide appropriate transparency—considering relevant laws, customs, and best practices of each market and region.
Our Benchmark Policy Development Process
Each year’s policy development process starts in the summer. By the fourth quarter, policy updates for the following year are released publicly, providing transparency to investor clients, companies, and the broader market.
All retired benchmark policies and related update documents since 2013 are available in our Policy Archive.
Contact Our Support Team
Need help navigating our policies, accessing research, or have questions about our services? Our help center can connect you to the right team.
Our Thematic Policies
We offer a wide range of thematic voting policies (also known as specialty policies) that are tailored to different investor views, needs, and objectives. These are developed through a collaborative process that leverages our team’s experience as well as input from subscribing investor clients and other relevant sources. The thematic policies currently offered are:
Global Board-Aligned Voting Policy
This policy is positioned for institutional investors wishing to vote their proxies in a manner that upholds foundational corporate governance principles as a means of protecting and maximizing their investments, while generally deferring to issuers’ board recommendations on environmental and social matters.
Client Custom Policies and Services
If you have requirements that our proprietary benchmark and thematic voting policies do not cover, we can work with you to develop individually tailored voting policies and voting recommendations. Our custom research team and experienced analysts will work with you to research, develop, and implement policies that align with your own specific guidelines and philosophies.
Our Biodiversity Signal for Custom Voting Policies allows subscribers to leverage our biodiversity-related Sustainable Development Goals alignment data by implementing an off-the-shelf methodology to drive vote recommendations based on companies’ impact on two biodiversity-related SDGs (SDG14: Life Below Water and SDG 15: Life on Land).
Our Net Zero offering for Custom Voting Policies helps to implement considerations of companies’ progress towards Net Zero and related disclosure as part of voting policies. By leveraging our extensive data and proprietary research, investors can make well-informed voting decisions that align with their organization’s objectives or client mandates.
Special Situations Research
Receive independent research on mergers and acquisitions, proxy contests and other corporate actions, helping you to assess risk, understand shareholder meetings, and make informed proxy voting decisions.
Flexible Solutions for Proprietary Stewardship Programs
Our Gov360 and Custom Lens reports on company annual and special Meetings include relevant data and analysis to support your decision making on meetings’ agenda items, leveraging ISS STOXX comprehensive governance data and analysis expertise.
Our Gov360 service provides access to impartial research reports on company shareholder meetings, leveraging ISS STOXX comprehensive governance data and analysis, to support independent decision making on meetings’ agenda items, without vote recommendations or rationales.
- Research reports without vote recommendations or rationales, built to power investors’ in-house Stewardship programs
- Reports rich in data, research and analysis by subject matter experts
- Contextualized decision useful data and analysis without rationales or recommendations
Through Custom Lens, you can subscribe to tailored research reports, with the flexibility to customize recommendations and analysis, based on their proprietary voting policies, included in their shareholder meeting research. This option allows you to package ISS STOXX background information along with voting decisions in one consolidated report. You also have the option to use your own branding on the report.
- Customized Research reports to support independent vote decisions
- Showcase your Custom policy recommendations, rationales and all supporting data and analysis in one document
- Powered by ISS STOXX comprehensive data and analytics expertise
Third-Party Policies
In addition to our proprietary voting policies, we offer a variety of third-party policies to meet your diverse stewardship objectives.
Proxy Research FAQs
Learn more about our proxy research and get answers to commonly asked questions, including information on how to contact us, our engagement practices and how subject companies can get copies of our research reports.
Policy Development & Application
We are committed to openness and transparency in developing our Benchmark voting policies. Learn more about our annual process of collecting feedback and how that feedback is used to develop draft policy updates on emerging governance issues each year.
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