WHO WE ARE
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OUR PURPOSE
OUR CLIENTS
OUR STRATEGY
MANAGING OUR CONFLICTS
Redington is an independent, purpose-driven investment consultancy. We provide a full range of outcome-oriented investment advice, research and technology to some of the largest and most sophisticated pension funds, foundations, wealth managers and other long-term institutional investors across the UK and around the world. Our advice extends across investment strategy, sustainable investing, risk management and manager research, and everything we do is driven by a desire to achieve the best possible outcomes for our clients and their beneficiaries. As long-term investors, sustainability issues will affect the value and investment performance of our clients’ assets over the time horizons that matter to them, which is why environmental and social factors are core considerations for us, affecting every decision we make as a business, both internally and when advising clients.
Last year, we were delighted to become the first B Corp-certified UK investment consultant. This formal certification marks the end of a rigorous application process that, in our case, took over 18 months to complete. It confirms our delivery of value across stakeholders and makes us part of a community of like-minded businesses (over 5,000 companies located across 85+ countries), united in a global movement to use business as a force for good. A fuller discussion of our score and areas for enhancement can be seen on the following page.
Becoming a certified B Corp is only the beginning of our journey of continuous improvement and collective action. We’ll retake the B Corp assessment every three years to ensure we’ve responded to the areas identified for improvement and are keeping up with the evolving standards.
As with our purpose more broadly, we regard our B Corp status as a mark of our ambition for the future, not as an end in itself.
We’re delighted that our overall score on the B Impact Assessment is comfortably above the minimum threshold required for B Corp status – 95.9 compared to 80 (note, the maximum available score is 200). This recognises the work invested into our stakeholder relationships since our founding. However, we recognise that this is a baseline from which we should continue to improve, and we seek to learn from our B Corp community peers.
From comparisons with our chosen peer group*, our scores are well placed across four of the B Corp pillars: Governance, Workers, Community and Environment. However, there’s work to do on the final pillar: Customers. We’re proud of what we do for our clients and the positive effects it has on their sustainability footprints, so, for the most part, we believe we can enhance our score by better articulating what we already do.
But we’ll also continue to seek ways to further improve the positive impacts of our work and its delivery for our clients. Across all the areas of the assessment, we remain eager to make improvements in our approach. Further insights from our B Impact Assessment can be found in the relevant sections of this report.
*We’ve chosen B Corp firms based in the UK in the Investment Advisory category – which in practice is a mix of investment management firms, wealth managers and advisers – as a 32-strong group against which to benchmark our performance.
Our client base continues to become more diverse as we seek to work with a greater variety of asset owners across a greater number of geographies. Our core client base continues to be UK DB pension schemes, where we specialise in providing leading advice to the most complex schemes in the country. The largest of these have led the UK economy in being the first entities required to report against the expectations set by TCFD (the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures).
We’re now working with more non-corporate DB clients than ever before. A key part of our offering to these, and all our clients, is our sustainable investment and stewardship work, an area we’ve invested significantly over the last few years to build our skills and expertise to deliver more effectively for all clients.
Over 2022, we carried out major projects advising on climate change risks and opportunities, effective stewardship and broader sustainable investment topics for clients that included insurance and savings providers, DB and DC schemes, local government pension schemes and endowments and foundations.
We were disappointed to learn that the Customers pillar is the one area of the B Impact Assessment where we didn’t score well relative to our peers. As set out in this report, we’re proud of our client service culture, and we maintain active contact with each client to ensure that any concerns or questions can be quickly surfaced and addressed. Our clients’ needs remain at the heart of everything we do.
On review of the self-completed questionnaire, it was apparent that we scored well on the questions that we answered (the Customer Stewardship questions) – achieving 94% of the maximum points for these. However, by not indicating that our services address a social and/or environmental problem for our customers and their beneficiaries, a wider series of questions were not opened to us.
We’ve strongly developed our environmental and social offering for clients over the two years since we began the B Corp application process, and are therefore confident that our rating in this area will improve following our next assessment.
We're nonetheless focused on further advancing our efforts to deliver positive impacts for our clients to ensure they remain delighted by our work. We constantly challenge ourselves to evolve and enhance our offering to clients.
Senior members of Redington staff, independent of the teams actually delivering client services, hold an annual meeting with each client to gain confidence in the delivery quality and to gauge client satisfaction.
We believe this provides a ready mechanism to escalate any concerns and are pleased that these meetings have, thus far, revealed continuing significant levels of client satisfaction.
Our strategy is intrinsically linked with our purpose and mission to help make 100 million people financially secure – for the benefit of people and planet. This ambitious mission requires us to look to expand the base of clients to which we offer our services.
Sustainable investment and stewardship are central to our strategic aims for growth as they enable us to build new client relationships with asset owners outside our historic core market and geography (UK DB pension schemes). We’ve already found success through this and, therefore, have a strategic aim to further advance our sustainable investment and stewardship offerings to clients.
Core to our ongoing success as a business is the strength of our client relationships, built on empowering clients to make effective decisions in a complex and ever-evolving world.
We look to build strong relationships with our clients and deliver the information they need through accessible, technology-enabled means. We measure the strength of our relationships with clients through a Net Promoter Score (NPS). Our score remains strong compared to international benchmarks; however, it has reduced over the year. The underlying methodology we use means that if our clients are not >90% satisfied with us, our score will fall. We expect this to happen from time to time, as the clients that make up our score in any given year, and the challenges they face, change. That said, we hold ourselves to very high standards and work closely with clients that have expressed areas where they expect more from us.
We hold annual meetings between senior Redington staff (typically the Deputy CEO) and each of our clients to gain honest feedback about the delivery of our services – from the quality of our reporting to the usefulness of our advice. The feedback from these meetings is shared with the client-servicing teams as appropriate to continue improving our client experience.
Over 2022, we combined our stewardship expertise with our leading technology offering to build a tool that helps us and our clients critically analyse the voting activity undertaken by fund managers. This tool helps cut through the noise, using significance indicators to determine the most pressing issues on which to challenge managers. Timely insight, deep analysis and leading expertise are the key strengths we’re looking to develop to help our clients quickly ramp up the effectiveness of their stewardship efforts.
The relationships we build with our asset-owner clients, combined with our position in the investment value chain, gives us a unique position to oversee fund manager accountability and advise our clients on the best way to invest sustainably – for the long-term benefit of people and planet.
Timely insight, deep analysis and leading expertise are the key strengths we’re looking to develop to help our clients quickly ramp up the effectiveness of their stewardship efforts.
We’ve deliberately designed our business to avoid conflicts, supporting our clear intention of always putting client interests first.
Unlike many other investment consultants, we’ve chosen not to offer fund management (‘fiduciary management’) or actuarial services, leaving us free to advise clients on what investment approach and which managers would best suit their needs.
Additionally, we don’t charge fund managers for our research on their strategies, meaning that our advice to clients is wholly independent. Consequently, our clients can trust that we have no hidden agenda or incentives and are solely focused on helping them achieve their objectives. This structural protection against conflicts of interest extends to our sustainable investment and stewardship offering.
We reinforce these structural protections from conflict by having procedural protections and requirements of clarity and disclosure by our staff. We take our responsibilities to Treat Customers Fairly extremely seriously, with any situations that might give rise to concern debated openly and honestly at our weekly Investment Strategy Committee. Our Conflicts of Interest Policy reflects the full range of what’s required of us as a firm regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). This includes the requirement that we take all necessary steps to identify, manage, record, prevent and, where necessary, disclose conflicts of interest between ourselves and our fund managers, employees, appointed representatives or any person directly or indirectly linked to us and our clients, as well as between clients.
We place the usual constraints on gifts and entertainment that might be seen to create a conflict of interest and require appropriate transparency and disclosures from our staff.
Over 2022, no specific conflicts of interest relating to our stewardship and sustainability work were identified. This covers the work we do for our clients, as well as the interactions we have with fund managers.
