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Asset Stewardship

To fulfill our asset stewardship responsibility, we rely on two main tools: voting at shareholder meetings and engaging with companies.

Our Approach

The aim of our Asset Stewardship program is to promote robust governance, including board oversight, and disclosures. The board of directors is accountable for overseeing a company’s material risks and opportunities and providing adequate disclosure of such. Therefore, the board is the main focus of our engagement and voting activities. We focus on electing capable directors and holding them accountable for disclosure and effective oversight of a company’s long-term strategy.

Our Proxy Voting and Engagement Principles

We have organized our proxy voting and engagement program around three broad principles:

Our Stewardship Themes

Using our Proxy Voting and Engagement Principles as a foundation, we focus on thematic issues that present opportunities and challenges to the companies our clients are invested in. The themes include climate risk management, diversity, equity & inclusion, and human capital management.

Our Global Proxy Voting Engagement Policy

View all of our voting guidelines and expectations.

Annual Asset Stewardship Report

Proxy Voting Choice

Leadership

Bio Image of Benjamin Colton

Benjamin Colton

Global Head of Asset Stewardship

Benjamin and his colleagues are responsible for developing and implementing our global proxy voting policies and guidelines across all investment strategies and managing our proxy voting activities and issuer engagements on ESG issues. Prior to Ben’s current role, he was the Asset Stewardship’s team Head of Asia Pacific based in Tokyo, Japan.

More on Asset Stewardship

For questions or any further information on our stewardship program, please email the Governance Team at State Street Global Advisors.