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After months of data collection and weeks of analysis, the 2025 Voting for Sustainability Ranking is now live. Our third annual assessment of sustainability-aligned voting covers 404 institutional investors representing over $100 trillion in AUM. Our analysis covers votes on 425 management and shareholder proposals from the 2025 proxy season — selected via an expert-consensus sustainability benchmark — to provide the first quantitative measurement of the voting gap between asset owners and asset managers. Congratulations to this year’s top 5 asset managers: 1. BCV - Banque Cantonale Vaudoise 🇨🇭 2. Domini Impact Investments LLC 🇺🇸 3. Trillium Asset Management 🇺🇸 4. a.s.r. vermogensbeheer 🇳🇱 5. Sparinvest 🇱🇺 Comment “report” if you’d like it sent directly — and find links to the report and your full scorecard available via the app (brilliantly engineered by Dan Bondor) in the comments below. Huge thanks to our clients, partners and everyone supporting our work: we believe transparent, data-driven stewardship is the future of responsible investing.

We recently hit a major milestone: expanding our dataset to include every N-PX filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 1,877 disclosures submitted by 1,403 institutional managers of mutual funds and ETFs, resulting in more than 20 million additional individual vote records. From the outside, this may look like a simple data expansion. But anyone who has worked with regulatory filings knows the challenge is far from straightforward. Here’s what we were up against: 📌 What made processing N-PX filings challenging Working across all filings meant dealing with: - Variations in how proposals are described, even when referring to similar or equivalent resolutions - Differences in the level of detail provided for company names and identifiers (especially for different share classes) - Filings without proposal numbers - Missing or bundled votes 📌 Turning filings into a trusted dataset → A strong data orchestration framework helped us track every transformation, quickly fix issues, and safely rerun pipelines when needed.  → We implemented multi-stage quality controls to detect discrepancies, reconcile filings, and ensure consistency. 💡 Innovation mattered: AI-powered proposal matching We used NLP and embedding models to extract meaning from proposal descriptions. This allowed us to match equivalent proposals across managers, even when worded differently, significantly improving comparability. 📈 The outcome With the addition of N-PX filings we now provide what we see as the most complete and reliable proxy voting datasets on the market, covering 39M+ votes every year. This foundation enables:   ✦ Stewardship benchmarking  ✦ Investor behavior insights ✦ Corporate transparency and engagement analysis ✦ Deeper understanding of how major investors vote on key issues 🚀 What comes next This *ratings-grade* dataset underpins our Voting for Sustainability ranking coming this Wednesday — designed to help end investors and companies understand how their shareholders compare across key stewardship and governance themes. As we prepare to share more, we’re excited about the insights this will unlock for teams focused on benchmarking, engagement strategy, and stewardship positioning. Follow rezonanz to learn more!

Where do you stand on sustainability? Next Tuesday, more than 400 ranked asset owners and asset managers will be able to log into rezonanz to see how they scored in our 2025 global Voting for Sustainability Ranking, and how they compare to global peers with over $100 trillion in assets under management. Each dot on this chart represents an investor’s aggregate score, based on 125,000+ votes on 425 key sustainability-related proposals, benchmarked using our methodology applied to an expert consensus benchmark of proposals from: Ethos Foundation (Switzerland) • Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) • ShareAction • The Shareholder Commons • Majority Action • PIRC Limited ✦ Preview access: Asset owners & managers with scores: Tuesday, October 28th ✦ Public launch + white paper: Wednesday, October 29th ✦ Webinar: Tuesday, November 4th at 14:00 CET Be among the first to see where your votes placed you: and how global stewardship leadership is shifting: register your account via the link in comments today.

“There’s a lot of policy engagement going on all the time. It’s just maybe not of the positive kind," says Colin Melvin. Investors are increasingly waking up to the importance of ensuring portfolio companies are lobbying in alignment with their climate goals, and engaging policymakers themselves. For the last in mine and Gina Gambetta's series on climate engagement, we took a look at how investors are sharpening their focus on systemic stewardship and policy engagement, best practice in the space and evolutions in sovereign engagement. Thanks to Miranda Beacham, Claire Jones, Leah Ramoutar, B.Sc, FCA, Antje Stobbe, Abigail Herron, Simonetta Spavieri, Bertrand Millot, Caroline Le Meaux, Alexander Burr, Tom Arup, Cristina Cedillo - van den Berg for their contributions and rezonanz for some interesting excerpts from your stewardship field guide! https://lnkd.in/eAW33MBF

Every field has its phrases that come and go. Some ideas expand until they reshape the field itself. “Systemic stewardship” is proving to be one of those ideas: continuing to gain both meaning and momentum. Direct engagement with single companies has evolved into a systems-level effort: shaping field norms, influencing policy, engaging companies on their lobbying and political contributions, and even engaging delegated asset managers on their proxy voting choices. That’s why the new Responsible Investor series on climate stewardship by Dominic Webb and Gina Gambetta, and especially the final article in the series focused on systemic stewardship, feels so timely and clarifying. I’m happy our new rezonanz Stewardship Field Guide could contribute to this discussion, alongside Colin Melvin, Claire Jones, Antje Stobbe, Simonetta Spavieri, Bertrand Millot, Caroline Le Meaux and other leaders advancing the aims of systemic stewardship. Since its release earlier this month, the Stewardship Field Guide has been downloaded nearly 200 times. It details how investors can transform stewardship from a compliance exercise into an effective force for change. Three patterns from the Guide are specifically focused on systemic stewardship: ✦ Pattern 17: Use Public Signaling to Shift Field Norms ✦ Pattern 18: Build and Fund Stewardship Infrastructure ✦ Pattern 19: Engage Policymakers to Advance Systemic Stewardship These patterns draw on evidence from Emilio Marti et al. on field-building, The Investment Association’s Public Register, recent research and position papers from FCLTGlobal and European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), and guidance from International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) and the Principles for Responsible Investment, plus our own rezonanz research and interviews. The full Responsible Investor article, our Field Guide, and the mentioned resources are linked in the comments. Plenty to reflect on as systemic stewardship takes shape.

Anti-ESG ≠ “protecting shareholder value.” New evidence suggests the opposite. The broader stewardship community has long worried about anti-ESG proposals flooding the channel and diluting the impact of shareholder proposals (see Pattern 15 in our recently released Stewardship Field Guide). Meanwhile, the anti-ESG camp has built its narrative around the supposed “value destruction” of ESG-related efforts. A new ZHAW School of Management and Law master’s thesis using rezonanz data finds the most negative short-term stock reactions when anti-ESG proposals appear on an AGM agenda: based on an event-study across 3,011 AGMs from 2021-2024 at 884 listed companies worldwide. ✦ What’s new? Patrick Lanz (ZHAW) built on prior event-study literature to measure share-price performance around AGMs, but went a step further: he analysed not only overall market reactions but also detailed sub-categories such as proposal type or approval rate. With support from Dr. Dominik Boos, his research adds nuance to a field that has long produced mixed results on AGM price effects. This isn’t investment advice (and of course one study won’t end the debate) but it does add to a growing body of evidence that markets pay attention to the kind of proposals investors bring forward. In short: voting is material to value creation. Congrats to Patrick on completing a thoroughly interesting thesis alongside a full-time role at Zürcher Kantonalbank. 👏 If you work on stewardship, markets, or governance, reach out to Patrick with feedback or to pitch him a PhD 👨🎓 ✦ Link to the thesis in the comments. ✦ Images below: (1) Patrick Lanz, (2) Overall AGM pattern, (3) Anti-ESG impact, (4) Key statistics.

Expectations of stewardship are rising fast, but what actually makes investor influence effective? After months of research, conversations, and synthesis, I’m excited to share rezonanz’s Stewardship Field Guide: a 60-page playbook for credible investor influence. Co-authored with Dr. Siyana Gurova and developed with Dr. Dominik Boos of the ZHAW School of Management and Law with support from Innosuisse, the guide distills 19 evidence-based patterns for effective stewardship: from defining purpose and theory of change to voting policies, engagement disclosure, and system-level stewardship. By framing stewardship as a “pattern language” of influence, the guide helps readers see how different tools work together, where consensus is strong, and where it’s still emerging. We couldn’t have done this alone. In addition to dozens of conversations with asset owners, managers, companies, and their advisors, we’re deeply grateful to the many experts who shaped this work and generously shared their (summer!) time and insights: Professor Emilio Marti: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Laith A. Cahill: Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) the team at ShareAction Matthias Narr: Ethos Foundation (Switzerland) Sana Mirza: The Investment Association Moritz Reisser: INFRAS Martina Wengle: CRIF & to Dan Bondor, our CTO, whose data infrastructure underpins much of the analysis This project reflects what we love doing at rezonanz: turning data and research into practical, evidence-based tools that make stewardship more effective and transparent. We don’t claim to have the final word on this complex, evolving subject, but we do believe the conversation is necessary, and hope this guide helps advance it. ✦ Comment “Stewardship Field Guide” and I’ll send it directly, or click the link in the comments to download it from our website.

PhD student Nikolaus Hastreiter has updated his working paper on the effectiveness of Climate Action 100+, the world’s largest investor coalition on climate change. The paper uses a multidimensional approach to measuring corporate climate action and applies Difference-in-Differences analysis with non-engaged firms to isolate the coalition’s causal impact. The updated version also includes new calculations of CA100+ investors’ collective ownership stakes (in outstanding shares) to proxy the initiative’s potential influence.   Key findings suggest that Climate Action 100+ has not affected climate-related disclosures or immediate emissions reductions, but its collaborative engagement has led to greater ambition in medium- and long-term carbon reduction targets. Notably, this impact is concentrated among the “Plus” companies, which were selected on a discretionary basis. Surprisingly, the study finds no evidence that the coalition’s scale – measured by collective ownership or assets under management – amplifies impact, nor any spillover effects to non-target firms. You can read all of the key findings, and download the report on our site ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/eh4XBtXS