Our strategy is to lead change

We have identified four focus areas that are important to our clients and we expect them to grow in importance as company disclosure and public discourse on these topics are driven by regulatory change and consumer demand. They are: climate change, modern slavery, diversity and biodiversity. In order to address these systemic issues, we have established and joined working groups with other institutional investors, as well as developed frameworks for research, analysis and company engagement.

We believe that when it comes to responsible investment, active management is much more than a simple box-ticking exercise. Every decision about where we allocate capital is a vote on a company’s fitness to be in business.

Keeping ahead of regulatory change, to complement our rigorous programme of individual company engagement we band together with like-minded institutions to set higher expectations for companies seeking the support of our investors’ capital.

Recognising that no company is perfect, we encourage management to examine their supply chains for modern slavery, consider diversity in their workplace, and scrutinise the impact of its operations on communities and ecosystems. We invest in companies willing to discuss and improve their practices as they are on a journey to becoming a better global citizen, just as we are.

This approach is in line with community expectations. A survey by Responsible Investment Association Australasia found that 9 in 10 Australians believe it’s important that their financial institution invests responsibly and ethically ¹.

We are seeing this same trend in client conversations occurring across the markets we operate in. With a greater emphasis on the social aspect of ESG comes a greater need for transparency from the investment management industry on how these issues are managed.