April 14, 2025
2025 Voting Policies: What’s New (and What’s Not) for Executive Pay
We’ve been playing our part in the annual ritual of blogging about voting policy updates from big asset managers. They made very few updates to executive compensation policies – and that trend also held true with voting policies that were published in March. Here are a few (incremental) changes that may apply to your company:
– Fidelity – consistent with policy clarifications that Fidelity isn’t intending to influence control of any portfolio company, Fidelity’s policy that it will vote against compensation committee members if the company hasn’t addressed say-on-pay concerns now refers to “concerns raised by shareholders” instead of “concerns communicated by Fidelity”
– T. Rowe Price – clarifying that T. Rowe has flexibility in deciding to vote against compensation committee members in the event of poor compensation practices or option repricings
– Goldman Sachs Asset Management – eliminated internal pay disparity as a factor in say-on-pay
Check out our “Investor Voting Policies” Practice Area for voting guidelines of other investors and asset managers. We’re blogging on TheCorporporateCounsel.net about changes to policies that are unrelated to executive compensation.
– Liz Dunshee