Speaker

Michelle Edkins

Michelle Edkins is a Managing Director in BlackRock’s Investment Stewardship team of over 60 specialists covering the Americas; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and Asia-Pacific.  The team engages companies and others in the investment stewardship ecosystem to promote the governance and business practices aligned with long-term value creation by the companies in which BlackRock invests on behalf of clients.  Ms. Edkins is responsible globally for institutional relations, policy on investment stewardship issues, and communications related to BlackRock’s investment stewardship perspectives and activities. She also serves on the firm’s Global Operating and Government Relations Steering Committees. She is an alumna of BlackRock’s Women’s Leadership Forum, Enterprise Leadership Program and Human Capital Committee.

She is an active participant in the public corporate governance debate and regularly speaks and writes on the importance of good stewardship for company performance.  She was named in the NACD (the US National Association of Corporate Directors) Directorship 100 Governance Professionals list for the past seven years.  She is Chair of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a former Chair of the International Corporate Governance Network and an Aspen Institute First Movers’ Fellow.  She currently serves on a number of industry initiatives to enhance governance and sustainable business practices including the US chapter of the 30% Club, a market initiative to increase the number of women on boards and in senior management, and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Investor Advisory Group.

Prior to joining BlackRock in 2009, she was Managing Director at Governance for Owners, an independent partnership offering products that support responsible long-term share ownership.  She started her corporate governance career in the UK in 1997 at Hermes Pensions Management, where she spent eight years, initially as the head of the corporate governance team and thereafter as Director of Institutional Relations.  An economist by training, she has also worked for New Zealand’s Reserve Bank and the British High Commission in Wellington.  She lives in New York with her husband and two children.