In this challenging economic environment, we believe that quality corporate governance is crucial to creating shareholder value—and that active investment managers have a vital role to play on behalf of their clients.

As geopolitical turmoil, persistent inflation and rising interest rates roiled markets in 2022, our investment teams again made their voices heard with our NB Votes initiative. Now in its third year, NB Votes aims to share our opinions by pre-announcing our proxy-voting intentions on an array of voting topics that, we believe, have material economic consequences for our clients.

NB Votes has three main goals:

  • Encourage companies in which we invest for our clients to improve their governance practices, thereby enhancing long-term value our clients
  • Improve the transparency of our voting process
  • Demonstrate how our long-term, active-management approach drives our voting decisions

Meeting those goals often means going against the grain: In 2022, we announced our voting intentions on 63 key votes and sided against management on 54% of them, compared with announcing 60 votes and pushing back on 52% in 2021.

In this latest proxy season, we focused on proposals addressing a host of issues—from board independence and ESG oversight, to incentive schemes and capital allocation—that we believe ultimately shape companies’ long-term financial performance.

This paper offers a sampling of NB Votes across key themes from the 2022 proxy season. All our views are founded on the conviction that active engagement is essential to helping deliver long-term value for clients—and while we acknowledge that our votes may not trigger immediate policy shifts, we believe our practice of regularly pre-announcing our intentions promote better shareholder engagement and send a strong signal about the direction we’d like companies to take.

Download the Full Paper
 

For a complete listing please see 2022 Neuberger Berman Advanced Proxy Voting Disclosures.