Governance Watch

Governance Watch enables pension funds, local government pension schemes and charities to comply with Myners Principles in particular shareholder activism, expert advice and trustee knowledge.

Compliance Made Easy

Manifest’s governance experts will save you valuable time, effort and opportunity costs normally associated with monitoring governance issues.

As your governance partner, Manifest will ensure that your fund is pro-actively updated with governance best practice and key voting issues.

A Statement of Investment Principles policy on governance and voting is just the first step to ensuring compliance with your legal obligations. What about on-going monitoring and follow-up? In an already hectic and pressured environment, you may find your team spending considerable amounts of time and effort checking to see if your fund managers have done their job. Alternatively, you may already use a voting service but find that reports are sitting in the in-tray unread. When it comes to quarterly reporting you may be confronted with a variety of reporting formats – or even no reports at all. That’s where Governance Watch can make a real difference.

Governance Watch significantly reduces costly and time-consuming monitoring by providing you with a succinct executive summary of the action items relevant to your fund. Governance Watch not only monitors your policy and alerts you to important up-coming issues but you also have the comfort of a thorough audit of policy implementation by your fund manager(s).

Governance Watch offers three levels of service to meet the needs of funds of all sizes and complexity of management arrangements. For more information contact: sales@manifest.co.uk

Level 1

At the entry level of service, Governance Watch provides the following:

A best-practice governance and voting policy that takes into account the very latest recommendations.
You will have the confidence that your voting policy reflects the most up-to-date standards.
A weekly analysis of up-coming shareholder meetings. This executive summary report enables at a glance analysis of issues to keep you in tune with issues as they arise. Manifest’s rapid turnaround of analysis will give you plenty of time to review events with fund managers before voting. Only the events pertinent to your fund will be highlighted saving considerable time and effort.
Monthly portfolio holdings review to reflect any changes in holdings.

Level 2

This intermediate level of service introduces elements of tailoring to provide a more bespoke service. Level 2 additionally offers:

A bespoke governance and voting template is developed based on particular concerns your funds may have e.g. CSR issues. Because our analysts perform the most detailed sorting and sifting of complex issues, you will only have to focus on the issues and topics of concern to your fund. For hard pressed fiduciaries this makes significant economic sense compared to the daunting task of reading 40 or more reports each week during the busy ‘peak season’.
Bi-monthly portfolio updates;
A quarterly portfolio summary analysis of the issues pertinent to your fund so that they can be compared with fund manager reports for any variances; and
An annual monitoring meeting to review and refine your policy.

Level 3

Level 3 offers the added comfort of knowing that their policies are being implemented via a thorough audit process. In addition to the elements of Level 1 and 2, Level 3 customers will benefit from:

Audit trail and vote variance analysis: Manifest’s software compares your voting policy against fund manager voting reports looking for any differences between policy and activity. These variances may well be fully justified, however you will be now be in a position to discuss these differences with your fund managers at your regular meetings. In a multi-manager scenario, this type of monitoring will help to eliminate variances in voting activity and create a constructive dialogue with your fund managers about future activity;
Weekly portfolio updates; and
6-monthly meetings with Manifest’s analysts to review policy and activism issues.

Added Benefits

Governance Watch range of services also include:

Agenda, our weekly electronic bulletin to keep you up to date with key governance and CSR developments; and
Governance Profile Reports available for each company in your portfolio on an as-needed basis to get to the in-depth analysis behind the issues.

High Quality Service, Low Budgetary Impact

Manifest Governance Watch will give you the compliance tools you need quickly and cost effectively - from as little as £3,750 per annum.

For more information contact: sales@manifest.co.uk