Krystal Berrini is Partner, Allie Rutherford is a Managing Director, and Eric Sumberg is a Director at PJT Camberview. This post is based on their PJT Camberview memorandum.
Over the past several years, large institutional investors have addressed their growing concerns about the demands of board service by adopting or strengthening policies on a director’s total number of board commitments. This trend has resulted in significant declines in vote support for some directors considered “overboarded” according to these new or tightened guidelines. In many instances, these investor policies are stricter than those of the major proxy advisors.
Heading into the 2020 proxy season, three institutional investors, State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), T. Rowe Price and AllianceBernstein, have tightened their director commitment policies. This follows similar actions by BlackRock in 2018 and Vanguard which adopted its first overboarding policy in April 2019. Vanguard subsequently modified its policy in early 2020 to allow some flexibility to consider company-specific facts and circumstances. As a result of these strengthened investor policies, non-executive directors who serve on more than four boards and CEOs (as well as NEOs for certain investors) who sit on more than one outside board can expect to see a decrease in support as compared to prior years.