Mark Labs believes that effective engagement is key to achieving ESG goals. Their Extreme Engagement Engine provides tools to facilitate engagement, including: tracking engagements; managing the engagement process; collaboration features; escalation management; and reporting. Research presented shows that successful engagements can yield stock price gains, effective governance mitigates crashes, and shareholder proposals increase gender diversity on boards. The platform aims to enhance stewardship through engagement intelligence and analytics.

1. Extreme Engagement Engine™
Stewardship with Real Impact
Nawar Alsaadi
Chief Strategy & Product Officer

2. The Solution: The Extreme Engagement Engine™
2
Mark Labs believes the missing link between ESG aligned funds and outcomes is effective engagement
Engagement Intelligence
Reports
Engagement Management
System
In-Built Engagement
Messaging System
Industry Collaboration
Platform
Escalation Management
Tool
Shareholder Proposal
Generation Engine
Secure Engagement Portal
Reporting, Charting and
Visualization Tools
Engagement &
Stewardship Guides

3. EEE™ Features: Engagement Intelligence
3
Engager
Engagement Topic
Engagement
Method
Engaged Company
Progress
Urgency
Track industry (and portfolio) engagement
activity in real time.
Index engagement activity by:
We track, analyze and curate thousands of external
data sources (engagement and stewardship reports,
regulatory filings and media reports) in addition to
our platform generated engagement data.

4. EEE™ Features: Engagement Intelligence
4
Track ongoing (and past)
engagements for a given company
Track ongoing (and past) engagements
for a given asset manager/owner.
We provide unique insights
on equity prices-
engagement activity
correlation

5. EEE™ Features: Engagement Management System
5
Initiate & Manage
Engagements
Add & Track
Engagement KPIs
Manage
Engagement
Contacts
Manage Internal &
Co-Engagers
Approvals
Launch Engagement
Campaigns
Co-ordinate with
Multiple
Departments

6. EEE™ Features: Secure Engagement Portal
6
Secure End to End
Engagements
Centralized
Engagement
Location
Easy Collaborative
Engagements
Simplified
Corporate
Engagement
Management
Automated
Engagement
Activity Alerts

7. EEE™ Features: Collaboration Tools
7
Collaborative
Engagement Writing
Tools
Collective
Engagement
Drafting & Approval
In-Built Messaging
System
Easy Meeting
Creation &
Management
Discussion Forums
& Ideation space

8. EEE™ Features: Escalation Tools
8
Escalation Tracking
Escalation Planning
Escalation Pathways
Mapping
Escalation Guidance

9. EEE™ Features: Extreme Reporting & Charting Tools
9
Detailed
Engagement
Summaries
Engagement
Timelines
Extensive Charting
Capabilities
Engagement
Analytics
Easy Export &
Sharing Functions

10. Leadership Team
Serial entrepreneur with a
background in sustainable
finance, consulting, and law
Background in computer
science, economics, and
social innovation
Experienced tech executive, 1x
Founder & 2x CTO, prior
successful exits
Kevin Barrow
Co-Founder & CEO
Galen Lewis
Co-Founder & COO
John Nogrady
Chief Technology
Officer
Nawar Alsaadi
Chief Strategy &
Product Officer
Sustainable investment expert.
Corporate engagement
professional, and ESG specialist

11. The Case for Engagement Analytics
Nawar Alsaadi
Chief Product & Strategy Officer
Appendix

12. 12
Active Ownership Study
Elroy Dimson University of Cambridge
and London Business School
Oğuzhan Karakaş
Boston College
Xi Li
Temple University
2015
2152 Engagements Studied over a 10 Year Period
(1252 Environmental & Social - ES)
(900 Corporate Governance - CG)
Case 1:
Identify Investment Opportunities

13. 13
Analyzing the engagement features and tactics, we find that
successful prior engagement experience with the same target
firm increases the likelihood of subsequent engagements being
successful. In addition, we find collaborations among the asset
manager and other active investors and/or stakeholders to
contribute positively to the success of engagements,
particularly for the ES engagements. This suggests that it
requires more coordinated effort to convince an engaged
company’s management regarding the ES issues, in comparison
to CG issues.
We find that ESG engagements generate a cumulative size-
adjusted abnormal return of +2.3% over the year following the
initial engagement. Cumulative abnormal returns are much
higher for successful engagements (+7.1%) and gradually
flatten out after a year, when the objective is accomplished for
the median firm in our sample. We do not find any market
reaction to unsuccessful engagements.
7.1% cumulative
abnormal returns in the
next 12 months for
successful engagements
(8.6% and 10.3% for Corporate
Governance and climate change
focused engagements)
Successful prior
engagement experience
with the same target
firm increases the
likelihood of successful
subsequent
engagement
Collaborative
engagements have a
higher probability of
success
Key Findings

14. 14
Tracking engagements
outcomes and topics has
potential major
implications on portfolio
performance
Mark Labs’ Extreme
Engagement Engine™
tracks ongoing ESG
engagement by company,
engager, topic, outcome
and start date. In addition
to facilitating collaborative
engagements
Source: Dimson, Elroy and Karakaş, Oğuzhan and Li, Xi, Active Ownership (August 7, 2015). Review of Financial Studies (RFS), Volume 28, Issue 12, pp. 3225-3268, 2015., Fox School of Business Research Paper No. 16-009, Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2154724 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2154724

15. 15
Corporate Governance and Firm-Specific Stock Price
Crashes
Panayiotis C. Andreou, Constantinos Antoniou, Joanne
Horton and Christodoulos Louca
Andreou and Louca are from the Cyprus University of Technology, Department
of Commerce, Finance and Shipping,Cyprus, and Durham University Business
School, United Kingdom. Antoniou is from Warwick Business School,Warwick
University,United Kingdom. Horton is from Exeter University Business School
2015
1552 Companies Analyzed
2002 - 2013
Case 2:
Manage Risk

16. 16
Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that a firm’s
governance system can be setup to mitigate the occurrence of future
stock price crashes by curbing opportunistic behaviour of managers
to strategically hold and accumulate negative information pertaining
to sub-optimal investment decisions and bad accounting conduct
such as earnings management
We investigate whether four dimensions of corporate governance
mechanisms, namely ownership structure, accounting opacity, board
structure and process and managerial incentives, relate to 1-year-ahead
stock price crash risk. Employing principal component analysis on the 21
attributes that comprise these four categories, we find that corporate
governance explains overall between 13.1% and 23.0% of a one
standard deviation in future crash risk …. overall our analysis shows
that corporate governance systems have a significant impact on the
propensity of the firm to experience a stock price crash.
‘overall our analysis
shows that corporate
governance systems have
a significant impact on
the propensity of the firm
to experience a stock
price crash’
An effective corporate
governance structure can
mitigate the occurrence of
future stock price crashes
Key Findings

17. 17
MSCI rates FedEx Corp. as an
ESG leader (lowest risk) in
Corporate Governance
(As of Jan. 30th 2021)
Corporate Governance Related Engagements:
Int'l Brotherhood of Teamsters
Individual Investor
New York State Common Retirement Fund
NorthStar Asset Management
Individual Investor
Addenda Capital
Potentially Corporate Governance Related Engagements:
BlackRock
State Street
At least 6 Corporate Governance
engagements were detected at
FedEx by Mark Labs’ EEE
solution over the last 12
months. Thus signalling a
potentially high corporate
governance risk at the firm
MSCI’s low Corp.
Governance risk
rating is inconsistent
with FedEx
shareholders’ action

18. 18
Can Shareholder Activism Improve Gender Diversity on
Corporate Boards?
Carol Marquardt
Baruch College, CUNY
Christine Wiedman
University of Waterloo
2014
182 Shareholder Proposals Analyzed
1998 - 2011
Case 3:
Active Ownership & Gender Rights

19. 19
From an economic standpoint, prior research posits that gender
diversity has the potential to improve managerial decision-making,
corporate governance, and firm performance, and empirical
evidence supports these claims. Gender diversity creates group
heterogeneity, thereby reducing the tendency toward “groupthink”
(Janis 1972), and prior research in the psychology and sociology
literatures shows that group decision-making efficacy improves
when gender diversity is introduced (Lee and Farh 2004).
The proportion of target-firm boards with at least one female board
member more than doubled in the two-year period following initiation
of the shareholder proposal, increasing from 21.7% to 57.5%, which is
significantly greater than the increase from 35.8% to 52.5% for non-
targeted firms. Similarly, the percentage of females on the board
increases significantly from 3.0% to 8.1% for targeted firms versus the
increase for non-targeted firms from 4.4% to 7.3%.
‘These results indicate that
shareholder proposals are
an effective means of
increasing the gender
diversity of corporate
boards’
‘Shareholder proposals
encouraging improved
gender diversity therefore
have the potential to
positively influence both
the financial and social
performance of
corporations’
Key Findings

20. 20
Writing, managing,
tracking and filing
shareholder proposals is
an essential feature of
Mark Labs’ Extreme
Engagement Engine™