Institutional Shareholder Services

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Institutional Shareholder Services
Basic facts
Location:	Global
Top official:	Gary Retelny
Year founded:	1985
Employees:	2000
Website:	Official website

Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) is a proxy advisory firm that guides investor and asset manager shareholder voting decisions, including on issues related to environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG).

Mission

As of 2025, ISS had the following mission:

“

ISS empowers investors and companies to build for long term and sustainable growth by providing high quality data, analytics and insight.

”

Work

As of 2021, ISS listed these nine businesses as part of the company. The ISS description of each business follows each bullet point:

• Proxy Advisory Services: "Institutional clients have long turned to ISS to apply their corporate governance views, identify environmental, social and governance risk, and manage their complete proxy voting needs on a global basis. ISS covers approximately 44,000 meetings in 115 markets yearly, delivering proxy research and vote recommendations while working closely with clients to execute more than 10.2 million ballots representing 4.2 trillion shares."

• ESG: "ESG solutions enable investors to develop and integrate responsible investing policies and practices, engage on responsible investment issues, and monitor portfolio company practices through screening solutions. It also provides climate data, analytics, and advisory services to help financial market participants understand, measure, and act on climate-related risks across all asset classes. In addition, ESG solutions cover corporate and country ESG research and ratings enabling its clients to identify material social and environmental risks and opportunities."

• Market Intelligence (MI): "Market Intelligence (MI) provides critical data and insight to global asset managers, insurance companies and distributors to help them make informed, strategic decisions to manage and grow their business. Through its combination of proprietary and integrated datasets, in-depth global research and trusted executive engagement, ISS MI delivers solutions for market sizing, competitor benchmarking, product strategy and opportunity identification across a wide range of financial products including funds, annuities, insurance, mortgages, and other instruments."

• Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA): "Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA) provides through its LiquidMetrix unit a wide range of offerings, including TCA, execution quality, market abuse and pre-trade analysis services across every public order and trade executed on European venues. Clients include sell sides, buy sides, exchanges and regulators that require actionable analysis, reports, compliance tools, and global coverage."

• Fund Services (FWW): "Fund Services is comprised of FWW, the leading German fund data disseminator and fund data distributor. Through the operation and licensing of data from its investment fund database, FWW helps investment fund advisors and investors make thoughtful investment decisions through the provision of transparent, up-to-date, and correct fund information across 1,500 data records on more than 33,000 investment fund share classes."

• Securities Class Action Services (SCAS): "Clients can access turnkey securities class-action claims management that is provided by Securities Class Action Services, LLC. With close to three decades of experience, SCAS provides a complete end-to-end global offering with offices around the world and research & claims filing coverage on all countries supporting securities class actions and antitrust cases. Its proprietary online database, RecoverMax, is updated daily and offers comprehensive class action data from all global markets."

• Media: "Media comprises a highly regarded set of publications, digital assets, and research known for their editorial integrity, objectivity, and leadership within the industry as well as a conference business in the retirement segment."

• Economic Value Added (EVA): "ISS ESG provides institutions with an established standard in measuring, analyzing, projecting, valuing, and discounting a firm’s underlying economic profit through the provision of Economic Value Added (EVA)."

• ISS Corporate Solutions (ICS): "Corporate solutions help companies design and manage their corporate governance, executive compensation, and sustainability programs to align with company goals, reduce risk, and manage the needs of a diverse shareholder base by delivering best-in-class data, tools, and advisory services. Its market-leading expertise empowers companies to meet the growing demands of incorporating governance and sustainability principles across the enterprise."

Leadership

As of May 2025, the following individuals were leaders of ISS:

• Gary Retelny, president and CEO
• Alexis Daur, head of global human resources
• Steven Friedman, general counsel
• Christoph Hansmeyer, chief financial officer
• Allen Heery, chief operating officer and chief administrative officer

What is ESG?

The term environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) can refer to an investment approach or an approach to corporate decision-making that conforms a company to ideas and goals that ESG investors generally accept. The ESG investment approach involves considering the extent to which corporations conform to certain environmental, social, and corporate governance standards (such as net carbon emission or corporate board diversity goals) and avoiding investments in or otherwise withholding funding from companies that do not meet the standard.

Opponents of ESG investing argue that it reduces investment diversification (which increases portfolio risk), harms financial performance, and contrasts with an investment approach that focuses on the likely maximization of financial returns to the investor. To learn more about the opposition to ESG investing, click here.

Supporters of ESG investing argue that in the long run, ESG investing will lead to acceptable financial returns. ESG advocates also say that ESG and profit are not mutually exclusive and argue that corporations can and should improve communities and the environment through the adoption of ESG philosophies and approaches.

For more information about ESG, follow the links below:

• Background: What is ESG?
• Reform proposals related to environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG)
• State legislative approaches opposing and supporting ESG investing
• Arguments about ESG investing
• Opposition to ESG and ESG investing
• Scholarly work related to environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG)
• Economy and Society: Ballotpedia's weekly ESG newsletter

Recent news

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms Institutional Shareholder Services. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.

Institutional Shareholder Services - Google News

See also

• Economic policy influencers

External links

• Institutional Shareholder Services website
• Institutional Shareholder Services on Twitter

Footnotes

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