Sustainability Insights

NYSE Issuer / Investor Dialogue - 2025

NYSE Issuer / Investor Dialogue

The NYSE sits in a unique position as both an advisor to listed companies in helping them meet the needs of an evolving investment community, as well as serving as a division of Intercontinental Exchange, a provider of data and workflow solutions to the investors evaluating those companies for investment. Particularly in the sustainability world, this allows us the ability to bring together investor / investee audiences to help improve the information flow between our communities.

The NYSE held our third annual session bringing together sustainability leaders from the NYSE’s Sustainability Advisory Council and responsible investing and stewardship leads from major asset managers in October 2025 in a Chatham House setting. Council members consist of heads of sustainability of NYSE-listed companies encompassing every sector of the economy and totaling $2.2 trillion in market cap, while investors represented equity assets under management of $3.1 trillion, including nearly every type of active investment strategy.

These recommendations build on those published in 2024 (here), as many of the same topics are still relevant. In addition to this event, we hosted 15 roundtables in 2025 with issuers and investors to further the conversation between companies and investors.

Most panelists accepted that there’s been a decline in the overall amount of communication on sustainability topics between companies and investors over the last year. Our conversation centered on two themes around bridging this gap: “what should companies know about responsible investing teams” and “what should investors know about corporate sustainability teams”.

What should companies know about responsible investing teams?

a) In 2025, stewardship became the face of the asset manager to many large institutional clients. We began hearing comments in early 2025 that asset managers that had dropped their membership in organizations such as CA100+ or Net Zero Asset Managers were now under heightened scrutiny from asset owner clients.

Asset managers cite increasing pressure from all types of stakeholders, including their top clients, to document their inputs, research, and conclusions; note that many are adding data, workflow, and headcount resources to meet these needs. Multiple managers cited new terms in mandates for reporting on their stewardship activities to asset owners, in particular.

b) Investors sometimes struggle with regulatory compliance. Since last year’s session, investor anti-greenwashing regimes have started to come online in the UK and Canada, and additional requirements have been added in the EU. Asset managers cited inflows into sustainability-focused funds, especially Article 8 funds sold in the EU. However, they reminded us that these funds now have mandatory reporting requirements, in some cases including reporting on information that’s not material to some issuers. The proposed changes to simplify the EU’s SFDR regime (and remove some of these non-material requirements) are generally seen as a positive, though will take time to implement.

Note that the SEC’s inquiry on compensation disclosures is one place where board comp committee members, company management, and investors might all align on helping to simplify disclosures and dialogue.

c) The presence of a responsible investing / stewardship team approach usually means a longer-term holding period. These individuals often deal with longer-lived data, need to think at a strategic level, and can be the check against short-termism inside an asset manager. Stewardship professionals noted that they’re often misperceived as “sniffing out problems,” when they’d contend their approach deliberately ignores less-material topics and adds focus onto longer-term business opportunities that might not show up in the next few quarters of the income statement that the fundamental analyst is modeling.

d) Investors see the “vibe shift” as an opportunity to gain clarity. Investors are happy to see the consolidation of key information in sustainability reporting. Beyond spending less time digging through corporate storytelling to get to the most important narratives and data, investors are also watching what topics are “quietly removed without explanation” from disclosure. “If a company says something is important, but then folds their tent, it says something about the business.”

e) Investors cite immediate portfolio impact from climate, and to a lesser extent, nature risk. The easiest example of this is the impact of physical climate risk on insurance premiums, but depending on the company, investors are actively making revenue / cost / risk adjustments on their views of companies.

We heard from both investors that are actively engaging with companies on natural capital / biodiversity, as well as those investors earlier in their journey. There’s a wide range of sophistication, though, meaning your conversations with investors may need a “101” and a “201” version.

f) Physical climate risk assessment is taking center stage. One well-resourced asset manager noted that it currently has 77% of its net asset value covered by location data that it can evaluate against acute physical risks (flooding / wildfire / hurricane), with others mentioning adding similar capability. Issuers may have better information than investors on specific locations, but their disclosures may be at an aggregated or more general level. When investors need to quantify these risks across their whole portfolio, they may need to do their own separate evaluation. Investors are open to conversations to help close this information gap.

g) Human capital management remains difficult for investors to evaluate, even given the proliferation of data sets. Controversies data sets may suffer from materiality maps that do not match what the investor is using, and “best places to work” surveys are limited and subject to manipulation. Investors counseled issuers to avoid “vapid” storytelling. For example, rather than just providing information around a program that’s “available” for employees, a more compelling narrative might include detail on usage of the program by employees.

h) Engagement at the right level of management matters. We heard stories from investors that saw “green flags” from senior managers that are able to identify key problems and describe their evaluation process, even if they’re not able to present a complete solution…contrasted with “red flags” from companies where senior management shows an investor that it sees a key issue as “someone else’s problem” internally. Investors almost always welcome viewpoints from board members in engagement if they speak effectively about a topic - but companies should be thoughtful and intentional about board member participation.

What should responsible investing teams know about companies?

a) “Just because we’re not talking in the same way doesn’t mean we’re pulling back on our programs.” We liked this comment from an issuer that summarizes much of the sentiment the NYSE has heard from companies this year. Many companies appears to be leaning towards a “minimum viable product (MVP)” reporting approach that will meet regulatory needs and discuss material topics only. Company sustainability leaders remain open to dialogue with shareholders about what they’re working on, but don’t expect exactly the same information in the same places from companies going forward.

b) Investor voices matter. A decline in communications with investors is often taken by boards as a lack of interest in sustainability topics, even if that decline is driven by less need for direct inquiry (as investors have more data at their fingertips). Companies continue to focus on the topics they hear feedback on from investors, and board members need to have a similar ear to the ground.

That said, some even large-sized companies are hearing virtually nothing from their investor community, which could mean any of “everything’s okay with the company”, “investor concerns aren’t on material topics”, “investors don’t have the bandwidth,” or “investors don’t care.” Our stewardship participants pushed back on the latter, but there may be cases of the other three rationales.

c) Keeping track of regulatory / legislative changes is proving even more complicated than in prior years. “Compliance requirements can come from many directions,” including a wide range of local or state regulations. Companies are likely to have their hands full tracking these new developments and making their sustainability reporting is fit for purpose to meet these various regulatory / compliance requirements.

As with the comments above, companies appreciate investors’ public efforts to limit fragmentation among regulators, and the more investors can do to push for harmonization the better should be for both.

d) While this may not have been true in 2020, company sustainability programs need to consistently prove their business case today. That said, these benefits are more likely to be quantified internally across the entire business, especially in terms of risks and avoided costs.

Hence, expect companies to review the parts of their programs where it’s more difficult to measure direct impact on costs/revenues. Note that this is almost always done in an industry context (one company’s comment to investors was that “the first thing we do is benchmark”), so it’s likely if one company is changing their program others in their sector may consider similar changes.

e) Companies may be hamstrung by changes to standard-setting. With both SBTi and GHG Protocol under active consultations for their core standards, companies told investors that they’ll continue to be open about their decarbonization programs and progress. However, as investors saw with the scrutiny of their own signatory organizations, companies should not be expected to commit long-term to structures that can shift under their feet, and companies encouraged asset managers to be open to independent evaluations that meet their investor clients’ needs.