Posted by Michael Flaherty and Patricia Figueroa, Gladstone Place Partners, LLC, on
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Donna Anderson leads the policy formation process for proxy voting at T. Rowe Price, an active mutual fund manager with more than $1 trillion of assets under management. Barely a decade ago, the proxy voting process for public company annual meetings was largely seen as a back-office, box-ticking function. Now, with investment assets growing and with investors across the globe pressing companies and boards to promote long-term strategic policies focused on benefitting the environment, society and governance, heads of governance such as Anderson are in an increasingly important and powerful position. She sat down with GPP’s Michael Flaherty and Patricia Figueroa [in December 2018].
GPP: T. Rowe has separated the ESG oversight duties, with you owning the governance part and your colleague owning the environment and social parts (Anderson previously oversaw all three). Why did you separate those out?
Anderson: My colleague you reference is Maria-Elena Drew, who joined T. Rowe Price in 2017 in the new role of director of research for Responsible Investing. She is based in our London office. We do view environmental and social factors as related but very separate disciplines from governance factors. One reason for that is that there’s a natural cadence to the corporate governance year because there’s a proxy vote. There is a certain amount of time-based screening and analysis that takes place naturally. The other major differentiator is everything that I need is a required public disclosure, and on the E and S side, the work is still very much around identifying and obtaining the data you need, then determining what’s relevant.
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