2025 Proxy Season Preview
Proxy voting has hopefully re-found its place as part of investment decision-making. As proxy voting comes back full circle, stewardship for long-term sustainable value creation is coming of age. SUMMARY Proxy voting has long been a fundamental shareholder right, long before “ESG” became a mainstream investment topic. Over the last decade, proxy voting has been […]
Anthony Garcia and Enrico Colombo are Senior Directors, and Peter Reali is a Managing Director, at Nuveen. This post is based on their Nuveen memorandum.
Proxy voting has hopefully re-found its place as part of investment decision-making.
As proxy voting comes back full circle, stewardship for long-term sustainable value creation is coming of age.
SUMMARY
Proxy voting has long been a fundamental shareholder right, long before “ESG” became a mainstream investment topic. Over the last decade, proxy voting has been increasingly recognized as a powerful ‘tool in the toolbox’ to engage with portfolio companies. With this recognition, some investment managers have used proxy votes to prove their ESG conviction or advance a normative position on what should create long-term, sustainable value. However, with voting under a renewed spotlight, there has been higher scrutiny from different groups, contributing to conflicting views of proxy voting and its impacts.
What is interesting in this evolution of views is that the activity itself of voting proxies has not changed. Rather, many in the industry tried to leverage proxy voting in pursuit of other aspirational goals – whether commercial or outright political. Regardless of motives, it is likely that proxy voting will continue to be a tool in the toolbox but fail as an arrow in the quiver of greater ambitions.
