Responsible investing
Beliefs
Our beliefs regarding RI outline the key considerations we believe can contribute to sustainability imperatives and better risk-adjusted returns for our clients.
Policy
Our framework aims to incorporate ESG factors, and broader systemic themes into our investment decision-making process.
Process
Our investment process elaborates how our responsible investment principles are applied and considered in our investment portfolios.
Portfolio
We incorporate RI practices into our investment portfolios through proactive allocations for impact and risk mitigation aligned with our responsible investing beliefs.
To ensure asset managers vote proxies in accordance with our requirements, we have developed a set of proxy voting guidelines. The guidelines are informed by the King IV Code on Corporate Governance which provides a philosophical framework within which we stipulate how an asset manager should vote proxies on our behalf. The fundamental purpose of the guidelines is to ensure that asset managers act in the best interest of clients. The main categories of resolutions covered and informed by the guidelines include board composition and directorship, environmental issues, remuneration and empowerment equity, among others.
Code for responsible investment in South Africa and the principles for responsible investing
As institutional investors, we have a duty to act in the best long-term interests of our clients. We believe in incorporating RI best practice in our investment process to achieve sustainable outcomes for investors. To this end, we have been a signatory to the Principles for Responsible Investing (PRI) for more than a decade and endorse the Code for Responsible Investing in South Africa (CRISA).
We recognise our duty to investigate the impact of ESG-related issues on the performance of assets and promote responsible benchmark-beating returns by ensuring that our selected asset managers consider and evaluate the risks and opportunities arising from the consideration and incorporation of ESG factors. As investors, we can influence the asset managers we appoint to apply sound governance and sustainability principles in their decision-making processes, such as those proposed in CRISA and the PRI and we encourage them to do the same with the companies they invest in.
For the 2021 reporting year, we maintained our strong rating and are proud to have scored above our global peers across most of the reporting modules. Overall, the results demonstrate our continued efforts and commitment towards ESG risk management and compliance with the spirit of the PRI.
As a multi-manager, we do not have direct investment in companies. Indirectly we invest through our allocation of funds to asset managers. Therefore, the impact we have is through our approach to evaluating asset managers, which involves these four main areas of focus:
Active stewardship and engagement are fundamental to our role as an asset owner and as a fiduciary. In our ambition to both create and protect long-term sustainable value, we believe that it is important to take stock of where we are as an industry today. This will help us to appropriately identify both risks and opportunities, respectively, into the future. In the spirit of providing meaningful insights and measuring our responsible investing efforts, we are proud to introduce our stewardship report. This report highlights key insights related to responsible investing and ESG integration in South Africa. The report also includes an overview of our responsible investing framework and our private markets ESG report where we showcase the impact we make through our private markets programme. We also demonstrate how we have incorporated certain ESG considerations into our portfolio solutions.