Georgeson summarized salient updates to Fidelity’s 2023 proxy voting guidelines. In addition to changes that reflect a focus on company-specific financial materiality and long-term shareholder value coupled with a retreat from the prior year’s more ESG-centric approach, the 2023 guidelines include a new framework for consideration of environmental and social shareholder proposals, as follows:
In general, Fidelity will more likely support proposals that:
- Address a topic that its research has identified as financially material;
- Provide disclosure of new or additional information to investors, improving transparency;
- Provide value to the business or investors by improving the landscape of investment-decision relevant information or contributing to its understanding of a company’s processes and governance of the topic in question; and
- Are realistic or practical for the company to comply with.
Also new this year are a racial/ethnic board diversity requirement (page 2), director overboarding policy for non-CEO directors (page 2), and compensation committee member accountability for a pay-for-performance disconnect (page 6).
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This post first appeared in the weekly Society Alert!