Stewardship

Effective stewardship of our clients’ capital drives our differentiated ESG approach, combining integrated ESG analysis and active ownership.

A consideration of ESG factors is fully embedded into our investment process by portfolio managers, and has been a standard component of our stock research template since 2009. Far from a tick-box exercise, this information is exposed to peer review as part of our process for building an investment case and is fed into qualitative analyses and company valuations. As with the fundamental analysis of financial factors, we focus on all the ESG areas that are relevant to the investment case.

Active ownership or 'monitoring and engagement' are essential parts of being a shareholder. We believe that governance and financial returns are positively correlated over the long term, and active ownership allows us to improve our understanding of investee companies and their governance structures, so that our voting decisions may be better informed. The materiality and immediacy of a given issue will generally determine the level of our engagement.

Importantly, as a company we also practice what we preach – exercising the same, high level of governance oversight, risk management and operational stability that we look for ourselves in investee companies.