JPMorgan drops proxy advisory firms in favor of AI platform

• Key insight: JPMorganChase has developed an internal platform to manage its company research and voting for U.S. asset and wealth management clients.
• What's at stake: The bank is the first investment firm to totally move away from using third-party proxy advisory services.
• Expert quote: JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon has called the firms "incompetent," and claimed their data is inaccurate.

Update: This story has been updated to include a statement from Institutional Shareholder Services.

JPMorganChase 's asset and wealth management unit is doing away with third-party proxy advisory firms, according to a source familiar with the matter, in a move that follows years of CEO Jamie Dimon's tirades against such firms.

The company's investment arm will shift this year to using an internal tool called Proxy IQ for its duties on U.S. company votes. The new platform, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, will be powered by artificial intelligence to aggregate and analyze data from more than 3,000 annual company meetings, along with in-house research.

The full transition to Proxy IQ will take place during the first quarter — making JPMorgan, with $4 trillion of client assets, the first bank to completely sever ties with the proxy advisors.

Proxy advisors, a market that is dominated by two major players — Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis — provide research, data, infrastructure and recommendations for investors to cast votes in companies they hold stakes in. While the firms' advice isn't binding, most research has found that institutional investors and fund managers often vote in accordance with the proxy advisors' recommendations.

An ISS spokesperson declined to comment on JPMorgan's move, but said in a Wednesday email to American Banker that the firm was proud of its "independent and high-quality governance research, recommendations, and voting solutions." Glass Lewis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move to Proxy IQ will cut JPMorgan's last ties to the firms, according to the source familiar with the matter.

Dimon has condemned the firms numerous times in recent years, saying at an industry conference last March that ISS and Glass Lewis "should be gone and dead." As of last spring, JPMorgan's asset management unit was already banned from using research or recommendations from proxy advisors, Dimon said at the time, but was still voting through those firms' pipes.

"They are incompetent," Dimon said at the March 2025 conference, adding that their data is "wrong," yet "they don't have to correct it."

Dimon's campaign against the advisors seems to be gaining traction in Washington. Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order tasking the Securities and Exchange Commission with investigating regulations around proxy advisors, especially in relation to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" and "environmental, social, and governance" factors — areas that the administration has actively pushed back against.

Federal and state lawmakers have also made moves to push back on proxy advisors. Last spring, the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee held a hearing entitled "Exposing the proxy advisory cartel: How ISS and Glass Lewis influence markets."

"Some have argued that it's too hard and too expensive to review the large number of proxies and proxy proposals — this is both lazy and wrong," Dimon said in his 2024 letter to JPMorgan shareholders.

Dimon has also personally seen proxy recommendations that have worked against him.

In 2022, JPMorgan shareholders rejected the bank's 2021 compensation packages for Dimon and other executives at the bank, in line with advice from Glass Lewis and ISS. Dimon and the other executives received the pay packages nonetheless.

In addition, both Glass Lewis and ISS have supported a JPMorgan shareholder proposal to split the chairman and CEO roles that Dimon has long held. That proposal has garnered between 37% and 48% of the vote across the last four years that it has been on the ballot.