Glass, Lewis & Co. (commonly referred to as Glass Lewis) is a leading provider of independent proxy advisory services and corporate governance solutions.
Alongside its primary competitor, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), Glass Lewis controls over 90% of the proxy advisory market. They play a critical role in the financial ecosystem by advising institutional investors (like pension funds and mutual funds) on how to vote their shares at company annual meetings.
Core Services
Glass Lewis provides research and technology to help investors manage "proxy voting"—the process where shareholders vote on company matters like board elections and executive pay.
Proxy Paper Research: Their flagship product, which provides in-depth analysis and voting recommendations on over 30,000 shareholder meetings annually across 100+ global markets.
4 Viewpoint Technology: A SaaS platform used by institutional investors to manage their voting workflow, implement custom policies, and handle reporting.
5 ESG & Compensation Data: Detailed tools for analyzing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) risks and modeling "Pay-for-Performance" to see if executive compensation aligns with company results.
6 Report Feedback Statement: A tool that allows public companies to submit a response to Glass Lewis’s research, which is then delivered directly to the investors before they vote.
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Ownership and Structure
Headquarters: San Francisco, California (with major offices in New York, London, Sydney, and Tokyo).
8 Ownership: As of March 2021, Glass Lewis is owned by Peloton Capital Management (a private equity firm) and Stephen Smith (a Canadian financial entrepreneur).
9 They acquired the company from the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and AIMCo.10 Market Reach: Their clients collectively manage over $40 trillion in assets.
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Current Trends and 2026 Outlook
As of late 2025, Glass Lewis is undergoing several significant strategic and regulatory shifts:
| Initiative | Description |
| End of "Benchmark" Policy | Glass Lewis has announced it will stop publishing a single "Benchmark" voting recommendation by 2027. Instead, they are moving toward AI-driven, client-specific frameworks tailored to each investor's unique philosophy. |
| New 2026 Guidelines | For the 2026 proxy season, they have updated their Pay-for-Performance model, replacing letter grades (A-F) with a numeric scorecard (0-100) based on six quantitative tests. |
| Regulatory Pressure | In December 2025, the U.S. executive branch issued an order calling for increased oversight of proxy advisors, specifically targeting their influence on ESG and DEI matters. |
Why They Matter
When Glass Lewis recommends a "Vote No" on a company's director or a compensation plan (Say-on-Pay), it can trigger a significant loss of support from major shareholders. Because many large funds do not have the internal resources to analyze thousands of companies, they rely heavily on Glass Lewis to provide the "independent" view on whether a company's governance is sound.
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