Our approach

Our approach to responsible investment and stewardship is designed to deliver the best possible long-term outcomes for our clients.

As industry practice continues to evolve, we continue to look for standards and industry codes to benchmark ourselves against. These help us both to identify areas where we can make improvements and to guide the development of our reporting and disclosure mechanisms, in turn enabling us to increase transparency.

Two important independent standards against which we benchmark ourselves are the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) Assessment ratings and the Responsible Investment Association of Australasia (RIAA) Benchmark Report.

We have been a Signatory to the Principles for Responsible Investment since 2007. Our PRI Assessment results provide a useful independent benchmark of our progress against industry peers. In 2020, we scored an ‘A+’ rating in 7 of the 8 categories against which we are assessed and an ‘A’ in the 8th.

There were changes in the assessment methodology from 2020 to 2021, with 2021 being a pilot of a new methodology¹. Module scores have moved from alphabetical grading (A to E+) to a new numerical grading system ranging from 1 to 5 stars (with 5 stars being the highest grade) in 2021 to reflect that scores for the 2021 reporting cycle cannot be compared to previous years.

In the 2021 PRI Assessment, we achieved 5 stars on Investment & Stewardship Policy, Fixed Income Corporate, Fundamental Active Listed Equity, and Direct Infrastructure categories. For additional information, you can read our PRI Assessment Report or access the PRI Transparency Report on the UN PRI’s website.

¹ Absolute grading is used to achieve a more balanced distribution of scores than under the previous methodology.