Stewardship
We encourage companies to improve transparency and disclosure as well as consider other perspectives when making business decisions.
We seek to build constructive long-term relationships with company management teams and we engage them when we see opportunity to effect positive change. Our institutional scale grants us broad and deep access to executives of companies in our research universe and, as a firm, our company engagements number in the thousands annually.
We believe effective engagement can lead to strategic decisions that enhance a company’s financial and operational performance. It can also improve governance structure, mitigate the risk of reputational damage, and positively affect shareholder returns over the long term.
For our equity teams, engagements are opportunities to share our investment philosophy and corporate governance values. They also allow our investment professionals to assess the quality of an issuer’s business strategy, competitive position, and management skill.
Our fixed income investment professionals generally engage with a company if they identify an issue and require further information in order to perform a risk assessment and make a well-informed investment decision.