Northern Trust has reached an agreement with Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) to by which clients can access corporate governance data on 7,500 global companies via Northern Trust Global Investor Passport.
“By offering our clients ISS corporate governance data, we are further integrating yet another significant information tool to assist our clients in managing their institutional investment portfolios,” says Matthew Tushman, Vice President at the Northern Trust. “Our capability to deliver corporate governance data will allow clients to determine the effect of ISS corporate governance evaluations on specific investments, as well as portfolios.”
CGQ is a rating system designed by ISS to assist institutional investors in evaluating the quality of corporate boards and the impact their governance practices may have on performance. Ratings are calculated on the basis of eight core categories: board of directors, audit, charter and bylaw provisions, anti-takeover provisions, executive and director compensation, progressive practices, ownership, and director education. Each company is scored individually and ranked relative to its index and industry peer group.
“The ability to receive Institutional Shareholder Services’ data via Northern Trust will be a wonderful tool for monitoring the corporate governance practices of the companies we are invested in,” says Bill Puckett, Chief Investment Officer for the $6.7 billion Teachers’ Retirement System of Oklahoma. “It will also greatly enhance our ability to develop new corporate governance policies and practices.”
“Northern Trust’s portfolio-specific delivery of ISS’s corporate governance ratings will provide a highly valuable and predictive tool for assessing portfolio risk,” adds Cheryl Gustitus, ISS’s senior vice president of communications. “It’s a very innovative application of critical corporate governance indicators.”
Institutional Shareholder Services is a Maryland-based provider of proxy voting and corporate governance services.