Francis H. Byrd

Managing Director

Francis H. Byrd is Managing Director and Corporate Governance Advisory Practice Co-Leader at The Altman Group. Francis provides strategic advice on corporate governance issues to boards of directors and senior executive management of corporate issuers. Francis joined The Altman Group in February 2009.

Prior to joining The Altman Group, Francis was Vice President/Corporate Governance Specialist at Moody’s Investors' Service where as a member of the fundamental credit rating team Francis authored over 90 published corporate governance assessments and sector commentaries; and evaluated the governance attributes and practices of hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies, focusing on the relationship between governance, risk and credit.

Prior to Moody's, Francis was with the NYC Comptroller's Office, where he developed the governance target list and managed shareowner engagements for the $105 billion New York City retirement systems and pension funds, a global leader in the field of institutional investor activism. Preceding his tenure with the NYC Pension Funds, Francis was a Senior Analyst with Georgeson.

Francis is a frequent speaker on corporate governance issues, having appeared on or been quoted by FOX Business News, Reuters, and Agenda magazine. Francis lectures internationally on corporate governance at university seminars and government conferences. Francis’ leadership and experience in corporate governance has been lauded by figures on all sides of the governance debates such as Kenneth Langone, a director of Home Depot and Richard Ferlauto, who directs investor activist for AFSCME. Francis also edits and writes for our weekly electronic newsletter the Governance & Proxy Review which is distributed to 24,000 executives, governance, accounting, financial and legal professionals.