The Investor Stewardship Group (ISG) is a collective of some of the largest U.S.-based institutional investors and global asset managers, along with several of their international counterparts. The members are a group of 50 U.S. and international institutional investors that in aggregate invest over $22 trillion in the U.S. equity markets. The ISG is being led by each member’s senior corporate governance practitioners, and the group’s corporate governance principles went into effect on January 1, 2018.
In the video above, Corporate Board Member recently sat down with Matthew DiGuiseppe, Vice President and Head of Americas Asset Stewardship Team, State Street Global Advisors and Investor Stewardship Group member to discuss the ISG’s goals and what it really means for corporate boards. Three key takeaways from the discussion:
- What led to the creation of the ISG? The ISG was an investor-led initiative, so it really was about investors coming together, understanding the commonalities in their views on governance matters and promulgating those to the market.
- How does it work? The ISG framework provides an opportunity for companies to proactively communicate the work they’re doing in governance and the thinking they’ve done in selecting governance structures.
- Will the ISG be actively engaging with companies? The ISG will be taking a macro lens and looking at a companies’ overall governance structure and having a conversation
around that, rather than around discrete choices.