Why investment stewardship is moving from proxy dependence to proprietary intelligence
Investment stewardship is ultimately a decision-making discipline. Every vote, engagement and escalation reflects an investor’s judgment about governance, risk and long-term value creation. That judgment is only as strong as the information behind it.
For years, many asset managers have relied heavily on traditional proxy-advisor models to help navigate thousands of companies and resolutions each proxy season. But stewardship is changing. Investors are building more of their own policies, perspectives and processes, and they need the data infrastructure to support that independence.
Stewardship teams will increasingly demonstrate independence through four capabilities: speed, depth, systematic analysis and control. The sections that follow show how these pillars help teams move earlier, understand issues in context, apply their own logic at scale and defend their decisions.
The pressure on investors is intensifying. Proxy statements are complex, meeting calendars are fixed and the time between filing and voting can be unforgiving. Analysis that arrives late leaves less time to investigate exceptions, engage issuers or align a decision with an investor’s own policy.
Diligent has just completed its first proxy season supporting an investor that has pivoted away from the traditional proxy advisor model. That experience reinforces a central lesson: independence requires timely, structured and defensible data that can move directly into an investor’s own workflows.
Diligent Stewardship Intelligence is designed for that environment. Data is delivered as early as six days after a proxy filing, helping teams identify risk earlier and gain valuable time ahead of shareholder meetings to focus on exceptions.
Speed matters, but speed without depth is not intelligence. A board change, compensation outcome or shareholder-rights provision becomes more useful when it can be understood in context: against peers, prior years, market practice, activist behavior and voting outcomes.
Stewardship Intelligence brings together more than 850 governance and compensation data points, covering the essential information investors need to assess “routine” annual meeting agenda items, with the understanding that each company has its own peculiarities and that investors track issues over multiyear cycles to ensure they are supporting sustainable, long-term value creation.
Against other data providers in the market, Diligent leads on breadth and depth of data. Adding to our Stewardship Intelligence cornerstones, Diligent provides market-leading activist investor and proxy voting data. That historical perspective helps teams understand how activists have behaved, what arguments they have used and what their track record is in terms of constructiveness and value creation.
Voting data adds another layer of insight. Investors can benchmark voting patterns, assess the impact of prior votes and bring evidence into conversations with portfolio companies and internal stakeholders. Together, these data sets help transform stewardship from a series of time-sensitive decisions into a year-round intelligence and auditing process.
AI is becoming more accessible and more tailored to individual workflows. That is an important development, which may in time help accelerate data extractions. However, the fiduciary responsibilities of stewardship teams mean that the accuracy of the data and rigorous auditability of voting recommendations are essential. Relying on AI for custom recommendations without structured data is not going to be sufficient for stewardship functions.
The next question for stewardship teams will be, “Can AI help us apply our own convictions to reliable, relevant and explainable information?”
Stewardship Intelligence is built as an independent data foundation that can be queried but does not produce recommendations on its own. Asset managers can apply their own voting logic, integrate data into internal models and workflows, and scale analysis systematically without outsourcing the thinking that makes their stewardship distinctive.
That approach can also make routine work more efficient. For large portfolios, applying a custom voting policy at scale may automate approximately 60–70% of routine voting decisions, reducing manual review time by an estimated 400–1,500+ hours annually. The purpose is not automation for its own sake. It is to reserve human attention for the meetings, resolutions and engagements that require judgment.
As one senior stewardship manager said at Diligent’s Stewardship Series conference in March 2026:
“The level of disruption in the stewardship space around tech enhancements is welcome and long overdue. I want to make stewardship even more insights driven - harnessing more data, better measurement, getting a more proactive lens to see if we can deepen the link between stewardship and value creation over time.”
The depth of this data foundation is already proven across the market. It powers shareholder advisory practices at Wall Street banks, law firms and proxy solicitors and is now powering asset managers directly.
That expansion reflects a broader change in stewardship. Leading investors do not want to outsource their thinking. They want to own the policy logic, the workflow and the narrative they can defend to clients, regulators, portfolio companies and their own investment teams.
Reliable, timely and deep data gives them a stronger starting point. Diligent Stewardship Intelligence helps turn that foundation into action: move faster, go deeper and act with confidence on every decision that matters.
The future of stewardship will belong to firms that can connect speed, depth, systematic analysis and control—turning data into independent, defensible judgment and creating confidence in every vote.
Find out more.
