BDO's annual board compensation report details director compensation practices of 600 mid-market public companies in the energy, financial services–banking, financial services–nonbanking, healthcare & life sciences, manufacturing, real estate, retail, and technology industries, based on 2023 proxy disclosures. In addition to compensation, the report reveals benchmarking data on board structure, stock ownership guidelines, and board gender diversity by company size groups and industry.
Among the noteworthy board structure-related findings are those pertaining to the prevalence of standing committees by company size and industry other than the three key committees (audit, compensation, and nominating/governance).
Across companies generally, for those companies that have non-core committees, Executive Committees are the most common by a wide margin, followed by Risk, and then Finance, regardless of company size. However, there is greater variation by industry, with Real Estate companies favoring Risk Committees, and Manufacturing companies favoring Finance Committees, over other non-core committees. Note that nonbank financial companies supervised by the Federal Reserve are required to establish a Risk Committee pursuant to section 165 of the Dodd-Frank Act.