ROCKVILLE, MD. (11 December 2017) – Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS), the leading provider of end-to-end governance and responsible investment solutions to the global financial community, today announced the pending launch of sweeping enhancements to its ProxyExchange research and voting platform.
Dubbed Project Mercury, ISS will on December 11 usher in the most sweeping improvements to ProxyExchange since the platform launched in 2010. Since early 2017, ISS has worked closely with a broad spectrum of clients to gauge their needs in creating a next-generation platform providing for clearer workflow paths, context aware design, and customizable screens.
With the enhancements, power users will have access to new, more intuitive screens to manage their workflow, while blending in historically rich content and features and allowing for increased focus on governance issues and voting decisions. Occasional users will find easy entry points along with a more guided, visual workflow experience to accomplish basic tasks quickly and efficiently. Underpinning the experience is ISS’ continued commitment to audited vote processes in a secure environment.
“ISS remains deeply committed to meeting the proxy voting and research needs of institutional investors, as evidenced by this release and our ongoing efforts to enhance our suite of proxy solutions,” said Lorraine Kelly, ISS’ Head of Proxy Business. “We look forward to rolling out additional enhancements over the course of 2018 to ensure ProxyExchange remains the industry’s leading voting platform for institutional investors, globally.”
New features within the Project Mercury release include:
- Welcome Page allows users to choose from the most common actions including voting, research look up, meeting workload management, and engagement access. Selections can be saved for future log-ins. Quick links provide navigation to other common activities.
- Re-designed Meeting Listings and Detail Pages bring research right to users’ fingertips, integrate e-mail, Watchlist capabilities and Engagements into workflow streams, and provide more visual meeting status indicators.
- Voting Pathway transforms the client voting experience providing power users customized settings to efficiently carry out voting while affording lite users a more guided experience.
- Vote a Meeting and Find and Download Research Pages present visual cards of meetings with links to common actions providing users a fundamentally easier way to vote small batches of meetings as well as look up research. Filter options allow users to screen for the most critical meetings.
Dozens of active ProxyExchange users engaged in hundreds of sessions of user acceptance testing (UAT) to validate the enhancements and to provide additional feedback to further streamline workflow.
“Project Mercury epitomizes how ISS listens to its clients and the value we place on their feedback to guide our product development,” said Kelly.
