How Glass Lewis Empowers Investors to Meet Expectations in the Updated UK Stewardship Code 2026

With heightened expectations around stewardship, the Financial Reporting Council’s (FRC) release of the UK Stewardship Code 2026 represents a significant development for institutional investors. This iteration of the Code builds on the vision of past principles with a renewed emphasis on quality over quantity, integration across the investment process, and a technology-enabled, context-specific approach to stewardship.

For asset managers, owners, and service providers, the implications are clear: effective stewardship must be intentional, well-resourced, and aligned with each organization’s profile and strategy. Here is where Glass Lewis — through its robust proxy research and voting infrastructure, engagement services, and recently enhanced technology offerings — is uniquely positioned to help. In this blog, we cover key expectations in the updated Code and how Glass Lewis’ solutions can support investors.

The 2026 Code: Key Expectations

The UK Stewardship Code 2026 include a number of themes with evolving expectations and accountability mechanisms, which align with broader market developments:

• Quality, not quantity: Signatories are encouraged to report on stewardship activities that are meaningful, proportionate, and aligned with their size, mandate, and resources.
• Unique investor profiles: Engagement practices can differ by asset class, investment mandate and jurisdiction. Signatories should use the levers and resources available to them to exercise stewardship, regardless of how capital is invested.
• Integrated strategies: Stewardship should be integrated into the investment process, and engagement and voting efforts should be streamlined to enhance information sharing and decision-making.
• Resourcing and technology: Organizations must disclose their internal governance, roles and responsibilities, and tools used to support stewardship — including their use of service providers and stewardship platforms.
• Monitoring and Escalation: The Code asks for transparent reporting on how engagement initiatives evolve over time, including when and how investors escalate — such as voting against management or filing resolutions — to push for change.
• Engaging across sphere of influence: To respond to market-wide and systemic risks, Signatories should also engage with other stakeholders, including bilaterally or in collaboration with others.
• Asset owner monitoring: Asset owners are asked to monitor external managers’ stewardship efforts, including on the progress and effectiveness of engagements undertaken, and how client priorities are reflected in practice.

This vision demands not only strategic alignment across teams, but also robust operational capacity and credible evidence of outcomes. That’s where Glass Lewis adds value.

Glass Lewis: Bridging Policy, Execution, and Outcomes

Glass Lewis has long supported institutional investors in their stewardship journeys. The 2026 Code reinforces the need for a holistic approach, which Glass Lewis is now exceptionally well-equipped to deliver. Here’s how:

1. Integrated engagement and proxy voting

One challenge for investors is ensuring coherence between engagements and proxy votes. Many organisations still manage these functions and workflows in silos, which risks creating a disconnect that undermines credibility, when voting doesn’t reflect the content or tone of prior engagements, and vice versa.

Glass Lewis helps close this gap by offering integrated tools and services that combine both strategies into streamlined data and workflows. Clients can use the Engagement Management Platform to record conversations, track progress, and directly link those initiatives to proxy voting activity. This facilitates a transparent audit trail that aligns with the Code’s demand for integrated strategies and credible escalation.

2. Technology That Empowers Stewardship

With the acquisition of Esgaia, Glass Lewis has enhanced its stewardship management capabilities, enabling clients to streamline and optimize data management and workflows. The platform allows users to:

• Record interactions across asset classes and geographies
• Link engagement initiatives and objectives to specific stewardship themes or investment priorities
• Monitor progress and outcomes over time (including resulting investment implications)
• Log escalation tactics (e.g., votes against directors, shareholder proposals)
• Export data for stewardship reporting (e.g., FRC, PRI, and client mandates)

These features can facilitate improved overall quality and capacity, while empowering investors to report with confidence.

3. Tailored policies, custom voting, and ESG insights

Every investor has a unique mandate, client base, and investment philosophy. Glass Lewis supports this variety by providing extensive research capabilities and a range of custom and thematic voting policies, to reflect different investor objectives and priorities.

Through Glass Lewis’ Viewpoint voting platform, clients can for example apply and execute their own guidelines, and benchmark against Glass Lewis’ policies to support internal decision-making. This helps ensure voting actions are both principled and context-aware — in line with the Code’s focus on proportionality and representativeness across mandates.

Moreover, Glass Lewis’ research help clients stay ahead of key controversies, shareholder campaigns, idiosyncratic and market-wide risks — all of which are critical to inform and prioritise stewardship efforts.

4. Supporting asset owner and manager oversight

Asset owners face increasing expectations to monitor how their managers exercise stewardship on their behalf. The Code calls for clear oversight structures, including evidence that owners have discussed stewardship priorities and monitored progress over time.

Glass Lewis supports this through dedicated workflows for both parties. Asset owners can evaluate and benchmark external manager stewardship data, and asset managers can share data using either mandate-specific workspaces or our Disclosure services. As dataflows between the Engagement and Voting platforms are integrated following the acquisition of Esgaia, this functionality – and the ability to aggregate reporting – will become even more powerful.

A Future-Ready Stewardship Partner

In a world of complex risks, divergent stakeholder priorities, and growing scrutiny, stewardship must move beyond intent and into demonstrable action. The UK Stewardship Code 2026 provides the blueprint; Glass Lewis offers the toolkit.

For investors seeking to credibly implement and evidence their stewardship approach — across public equities, fixed income, and beyond — Glass Lewis can empower you to  operationalise your strategy and meet the expectations of clients, regulators, and the broader market.

Read more about the Viewpoint voting platform, or how Glass Lewis’ engagement services and technology can support your stewardship ambitions.

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