Global Capital Markets

Cats and Kings. A fierce catfight over Institutional Shareholder Service’s reputation as a proxy advisor has spilled from mainstream media into the blogosphere. The row erupted on August 21 when New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson lambasted ISS for harboring undisclosed potential conflicts when it recommended in favor of Washington Mutual’s controversial takeover of Providian Financial. ISS CEO John Connolly responded with a scathing rebuttal letter and demand for a meeting with NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. Then blogs such as Gawker and Romenesko picked up the story, according to The Deal. The duel demonstrates the rise in media scrutiny of proxy advisors—particularly market-dominating ISS—as they increasingly are seen as corporate kingmakers.


Vote+. As expected, Proxy Governance (PG) this week unveiled what it calls a “heavy duty, high-capacity, state of the art” platform for online voting. It is aimed to money managers, offering research and vote recommendations, policy guideline development, execution of voting decisions, ballot processing, record keeping and reporting. PG’s leading full-service rival in the US is Institutional Shareholder Services. Other domestic competitors are ADP and Swingvote, which provide electronic voting platforms but no in-house generated research, and Glass Lewis and Egan Jones, which specialize in research. Elsewhere, Manifest in the UK and Proxinvest in France offer electronic voting platforms but so far with limited international reach. Proxy Governance’s version, “millions of dollars” in development, is based on voting technology from parent FOLIOfn.