The Top 15 Anticipated ESG-Related Considerations That Will Influence Strategy in 2023

1. Blackrock’s voting “democratization” will gain popularity & eventual adoption by State Street & Vanguard, thereby adding yet another drain on management’s investor engagement resources

Larry Fink’s 2022 letter to CEOs outlines an unprecedented systematic change to proxy voting and marks a potentially disruptive inflection point within the conventional proxy voting process.[1] According to Blackrock, “this option gives institutional clients in separately managed accounts (SMAs) the ability to exercise their voting decisions on the topics or at the companies that matter most to them.” In other words, Blackrock has opened the door to an entirely new roster of complex stakeholders.

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