From the Editor...

We've had some technical difficulties with our website and email system this week, but it's been resolved and you now should have no trouble logging on to www.fundboardviews.com or contacting us via email. Apologies for the disruption and any inconveniences this caused. We're very glad to be back to normal!

One of the highlights of the summer is Management Practice Inc.'s annual report on chief compliance officer compensation, and this year the Stamford, Conn.-based firm reported that CCOs made slightly more in 2016—but not a lot more. There are some plausible reasons for this slowdown in pay increase, and it's definitely something to watch going forward. 

Another feature of the summer is our annual list of good reads for directors. This year, the 10 Things list is as eclectic as always with governance-related titles, business and career books, biographies, and fiction making the cut. Although this time of year can be very busy, it's also a time of year to kick back and relax with a good book, and we sure hope this list provides our readers with some ideas for what to pack in that beach bag (even if few of them are what would normally be considered "beach reads."). 

Speaking of busy, many well-established fund boards have been dealing with—or are poised to have to deal with—retirements of long-standing independent directors. Particularly when those retirements come in clumps—several in a single year or over the course of many consecutive years—this means a real need to focus on succession planning. The boards of Voya Funds and PNC Funds are two boards tackling this issue right now, and there is much to learn from how these and other boards approach the task of recruiting new directors. 

In addition to our proprietary stories, please check out FBV's Added Perspective section, where we post previously published content that we think may be of interest to our readers but that we wouldn't normally cover ourselves. If you have written something or see something written by someone else that may fit in Added Perspective, please feel free to drop us a line. As always, we'd love to hear from you.

For now,

Hillary Jackson, founding editor