The Northern Trust Company, a leading provider of global custody, asset administration, and investment management services, announced today that it will offer institutional clients access to Institutional Shareholder Services' (ISS) Corporate Governance Quotient (CGQ) scores via Northern Trust Global Investor Passport(R).
"By offering our clients ISS corporate governance data, we are further integrating yet another significant information tool to assist our clients in managing their institutional investment portfolios," said Matthew Tushman, Vice President at the Northern Trust. "Our capability to deliver corporate governance data will allow clients to determine the effect of ISS corporate governance evaluations on specific investments, as well as portfolios."
Using a comprehensive set of consistently applied criteria to each of the 7,500 companies rated, CGQ is a rating system designed by ISS to assist institutional investors in evaluating the quality of corporate boards and the impact their governance practices may have on performance. Ratings are calculated on the basis of eight core categories: board of directors, audit, charter and bylaw provisions, anti-takeover provisions, executive and director compensation, progressive practices, ownership, and director education. Each company is scored individually and ranked relative to its index and industry peer group.
"The ability to receive Institutional Shareholder Services' data via Northern Trust will be a wonderful tool for monitoring the corporate governance practices of the companies we are invested in," said Bill Puckett, Chief Investment Officer for the $6.7 billion Teachers' Retirement System of Oklahoma. "It will also greatly enhance our ability to develop new corporate governance policies and practices."
"Northern Trust's portfolio-specific delivery of ISS's corporate governance ratings will provide a highly valuable and predictive tool for assessing portfolio risk," said Cheryl Gustitus, ISS's senior vice president of communications. "It's a very innovative application of critical corporate governance indicators."