WHO WE ARE
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Our purpose & history
Our clients
Our strategy & evaluation
Managing conflicts
We have been a purpose-driven firm since our foundation almost 18 years ago. On a mission to make 100 million people financially secure, Redington first set out to revolutionise how the UK pensions industry managed risk to ensure that pension members received their benefits from retirement, on time and in full. That focus on beneficiaries remained front and centre as we expanded our work in new jurisdictions and markets.
In recent years, we have taken concrete steps to embed sustainability at the core of what we do, as financial security can only exist on a thriving planet, and within a fair and just society. From adding "for the benefit of people and planet" to our mission statement and building our sustainability resource and expertise, to expanding our industry footprint and participation, and becoming a certified B Corp, these steps underscore the emphasis we place on positive impact for our stakeholders and planet.
We continue to reflect on how much has changed over recent years for us as a company, but also for the world and the people that inhabit it. So, in 2023 our Board refreshed our road map for the coming three years and set sustainability as one of three core pillars – alongside partnerships and innovation – to underpin everything we do as we grow the business in size and across geographies and service lines.
The weather is becoming more extreme, emissions continue to rise, nature is being denuded, inequalities persist, and global conflicts have escalated. Despite this, we remain optimistic: innovation continues, advocacy is louder than ever, and the global investment community is starting to bend the curve towards a more sustainable path.
We know that we must continue to play our part in delivering against that optimism, and stand ready to continue evolving in a way that helps our clients navigate these challenging times in an uncertain world. That’s how we will stay true to our purpose.
Our business was created to provide leading advice to some of the largest and most complex UK DB pension schemes. These clients still make up the majority of the asset-owners and intermediaries we support, both by number and assets under advice.
In 2023, we continued to diversify our client base to increasingly include DC pension schemes, local government pension schemes, endowments, foundations and wealth managers, as well as insurance and savings providers. We have invested significantly in sustainable investment and stewardship work over the last few years to build our skills and expertise to deliver more effectively for all clients.
With a more diverse client base, we are being challenged to deliver projects that are increasingly diverse in nature. Over the past year, we have continued advising our clients on the risks and opportunities of climate change, effective stewardship including engagement and voting, as well as increasingly helping clients with other sustainability investment topics such as nature and biodiversity, diversity equity and inclusion, public health, and workforce issues. Some clients receive only sustainable investment or stewardship advice; others hire us for a broader suite of advisory services.
At Redington, 2023 was the first of a refreshed 3-year road map agreed by the Board. We are proud that sustainable investment is a key element of this plan. Explicitly recognising sustainable investment in this way is not only a reflection of its importance to us as a firm but also a growing demand from our clients.
As ever, we recognise that our success relies on the robustness of our client relationships, which are founded on empowering them to make informed decisions in a constantly changing and intricate world. We aim to establish strong connections with our clients and provide them with the information they require through technology-enabled and easily accessible means. We measure the strength of our relationships with clients through a Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric. Our NPS score remains strong compared to international benchmarks and we were particularly pleased to see it increase over the year.
In last year’s report we stated our intent to further build positive impact for our clients in line with the Customers pillar of the B Impact Assessment. As part of this, we continue to hold annual meetings between senior Redington staff (typically our 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 delivery and client experience.
By prioritising sustainable investment, we have been able to deliver new projects and services that fulfil crucial client needs. There has been a real push in the industry over the past few years to define ESG beliefs, put in place robust sustainable investment policies, set objectives and publish climate reports. 2023 saw clients’ emphasis on building the foundations of their sustainable investment approaches move to taking steps to achieve their given objectives.
During the year we rolled out our Enhanced Stewardship Platform (ESP) to clients. We have already seen strong interest for this offering and it is already helping an increasing number of clients to understand and make sense of what’s being done on their behalf (report), consider whether that’s good enough and identify any areas of weakness (assess), and challenge and press fund managers to deliver more (engage).
In 2023 we dedicated significant time and resources to finding further credible sustainable investment opportunities our clients can invest in. A highlight from this perspective has been the completion of our first nature-based solutions preferred list, which we worked on for over 18 months and were thrilled to bring to our client-base during 2023. This has also allowed us to start advising clients on credible nature-positive net-zero investments, an area for critical focus in 2024 and beyond.
We’ve deliberately designed our business to avoid conflicts, supporting the clear intention to always put client interests first.
We’ve chosen not to offer fund management (‘fiduciary management’) services, enabling us to offer clients truly independent advice 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. Therefore, our clients can trust that we 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. One of our core values is to Treat Customers Fairly and we take this 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 necessary constraints on gifts and entertainment that might be seen to create a conflict of interest, and require appropriate transparency and disclosures from our staff.
We are always conscious of the need to maintain our independence with regard to the preferred investment managers we recommend to our clients. To do so we avoid any relationships that may give rise to any appearance of conflicts of interest.
In particular, we are always wary about commercial relationships with investment managers. So, when a manager approached us to ask for our support in the production of their stewardship report in 2023, it only took a brief internal discussion before we agreed to decline this opportunity. The manager had been flexible on the nature and scale of the support we might provide, across the full spectrum from the substantive role of creating the written report to as limited as reviewing their drafted report, prior to submission to the FRC. While this represented a commercial opportunity for our business, we didn’t believe that any level of such work would be appropriate.
This approach further allows us to maintain our independence in assessing manager stewardship code reporting in our annual public analysis.
