Not long ago, executives could track the path of relevant regulation by casting an occasional weather eye on the Securities and Exchange Commission. If you were an expert, you glanced at what Congress was doing once or twice a year and remained informed. Those days are gone.

Today, the future of corporate governance law, regulation, and enforcement is being forged in multiple cities on multiple continents—especially in Brussels and London—as well as Washington, DC.

What happens in one capital often doesn't stay there. It may well migrate to affect your company. And by the way, that's as true now in corporate governance as it is in M&A, antitrust, consumer protection, data privacy, and other fields. Sure, the United States is a prime regulator, but it's not the only one of significance, even for companies with little in the way of overseas operations. So what's on the horizon, with the prospect of coming our way from across the seas?

First, let's look at the hot-button issue of proxy voting agents. Remember how the SEC launched with fanfare a “proxy plumbing” project back in 2010? Regulators raised expectations of a root-and-branch modernization of the U.S. voting infrastructure, which was built for a long-vanished era.

Further, the SEC rattled sabers on proxy advisors, inviting market views on whether the SEC ought to toughen regulation covering them. At this writing, four years on, nothing has yet emerged.

Meanwhile, the EU's uber-financial markets regulator, the European Securities and Markets Authority, has charged ahead. On proxy advisers, an ESMA analysis declared unequivocally, “There is no current market failure related to proxy advisers' interaction with investors and issuers.” Regulators, however, forced industry firms to devise their own code of conduct to deliver more information on independence and accuracy.

ESMA also knocked heads at proxy advisories ISS and Glass Lewis, together with counterparts in Europe—IVOX, Manifest, PIRC, and Proxinvest—and the six agreed on standards, something critics here in the United States had been trying to do for years without success. The “Best Practice Principles for Shareholder Voting Research Providers” are now live, and available at http://bppgrp.info.

Those standards will wind up applying to proxy advisers not just in Europe, but worldwide. And if you believe results of a snap poll at the June annual International Corporate Governance Network conference in Amsterdam, investors want the code to apply to other entities too, including governance raters and even shareowner associations that offer voting counsel.

What happens in one capital often doesn't stay there. It may well migrate to affect your company. And by the way, that's as true now in corporate governance as it is in M&A, antitrust, consumer protection, data privacy, and other fields.

Private conversations with proxy advisers reveal that they expect the SEC already to have taken ESMA's actions into account and to suggest standards that look remarkably similar. So will the Canadian Securities Administrators group, which is planning a framework for proxy advisers. If so, ESMA—based in Europe—will have defined proxy advisory regulation worldwide.

The Europeans acted, too, on the workings of proxy voting. To be sure, issues there are different; each of the EU's 28 member states has its own rules, procedures, costs, and disclosure regimes. Cross-border voting, for example, can be a nightmare. But some solutions are global in nature. Companies want easy identification of their investors, for instance, while investors want vote confirmation.

The European Commission's newly revised Shareholder Rights Directive—still to be ratified—tackles both, empowering “the Commission to adopt implementing acts to ensure an efficient and effective system of shareholder identification, transmission of information, and facilitation of exercise of shareholder rights.” That looks like open-ended regulation—something that irritates almost everyone, but gives Brussels new authority to sway global standards. The mandarin to watch: Jeroen Hooijer, head of corporate governance and social responsibility at the Commission's Internal Markets division.

Coming to America?

The Shareholder Rights Directive could hold sway well outside the EU nations. Some steps—for instance, universal say-on-pay votes, a policy imported from Britain—are already in the Dodd-Frank Act. Others are new and could spark copycat rules here. For instance, the Directive would require asset owners such as pension funds to publicly explain how they engage with portfolio companies. Funds would also have to report how their investments and features such as money manager pay align with long-term interests of beneficiaries, though that proposal is getting plenty of push-back, as it threatens to intervene in private contractual relationships.

Still, it is clear that regulators in both Brussels and London are trying to find steps to catalyze more lively ownership behavior by institutional investors. If the strategy works, you can expect more scrutiny not only from your EU-based shareholders, but from big U.S. institutions complying with EU law or the U.K. Stewardship Code. After all, the capital markets are global, and mega-managers such as Blackrock invest on behalf of European investors as well as U.S. ones.

One of the EU's most potent initiatives has come in the area of board diversity. Adapting from Norway's lead, the Commission has now imposed a soft-quota system across the region to boost the number of women on corporate boards. The figure varies among member states, but public companies are looking at a deadline of 2020 or earlier to bring the percentage of women directors to 40 percent from roughly 17 percent today. It may be hard to imagine Congress pursuing board gender quotas in the United States right now, but pressure could mount if the move to diversity among U.S. directors continues at a snail's pace, while European corporate boards diversify rapidly over the next six years.

More Fund Governance

Regulators in Europe are not stopping at corporate governance, either. They are tinkering with the governance of funds themselves—in ways that could produce knock-on effects at U.S. companies. The Dutch Central Bank now has authority to screen board members of pension funds to ensure they are capable of meeting fiduciary obligations. The Central Bank of Ireland and the Commission de Surveillance du Sectueur Financial  in Luxembourg already screen and approve trustees on UCITs, the European equivalent of mutual funds.

The only practice close to that on the corporate side is the Bank of England's review of bank board directors. Otherwise, European governments usually stay well clear of intervening in individual director selections in the private sector. But the spotlight on fund governance could be a harbinger of fresh public sector focus on investor competence—and another spur to more lively investor ownership.

One way to monitor these tides is by regularly checking the Twitter feed at #corpgov, though there is lots of ephemera to sort through to find the nuggets of insight. You can also review real-time entries at relevant past conferences such as the ICGN's recent Amsterdam event, at #ICGN14. You wouldn't be alone: Data show nearly 200,000 users around the world would have seen at least one tweet from that conference. Or you can establish your own Google news alert. But there is no substitute for actually attending these events to network and gather insights on overseas developments that may affect companies in the US.

For your 2015 calendar, mark June 3-5 at the Guildhall in London for the ICGN's annual meeting—also the group's 20th anniversary. Closer to home, the ICGN will mark its milestone jointly with the Council of Institutional Investors' 30th anniversary in a wall-to-wall governance week in Boston beginning Sept. 28, 2015. Foliage will be changing outside the Westin Copley Place; but global developments profiled inside could give you a glimpse of things to come.

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