HOW WE MANAGE OURSELVES
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How we're governed
Our culture
Our team, resourcing and incentives
Our footprint
18 years since its inception, Redington is still part-owned by founders Rob Gardner and Dawid Konotey-Ahulu. Dawid continues to sit on our Board as a non-executive director. A number of our senior people are also shareholders in the business. Alongside them, as a majority shareholder, is Phoenix Equity Partners, a UK-based private equity firm, which invested in Redington in 2020.
At year-end, the Redington Board comprised: three executive directors (our CEO, Deputy CEO, and CFO), Dawid Konotey-Ahulu (Co-Founder, Non-Executive Director), Sandy Muirhead (Independent, Non-Executive Director), Hugh Lenon (Non-Executive Chairman, and part-time Chairman of Phoenix Equity Partners), and James Squires (Non-Executive Director, and Partner at Phoenix Equity Partners). Over the year, the previous Board Chair, Kathryn Purves, stepped down following a new appointment and Hugh took on the role.
Our Board works with the executive team to set Redington’s strategic direction and ambitions. It continues to encourage the maintenance of our longstanding entrepreneurial culture and growth mindset, including the expansion of our sustainability and stewardship services. Given the strategic importance of sustainable investment and stewardship, these are areas on which the Board focuses a good deal of time and attention, with regular contact with the heads of our sustainability and stewardship business.
Our sustainability and stewardship activities were previously overseen by an executive Sustainable Investment Committee. In 2023 we undertook a governance review of this committee to ensure it remained efficient and reflected current best practices. The review found considerable overlap, in terms of both committee members and topics, between the Sustainable Investment Committee and other firm-wide oversight functions. This reflects our intent that sustainability is integral to all we do, from an internal, operational, risk and investment advisory perspective. As such, the decision was made to disband the Sustainable Investment Committee, choosing instead to deepen the integration of its work across all other committees. For example, in 2023, a rotating Sustainable Investment member was added to our Investment Strategy Committee (which meets weekly) to ensure clear sustainability input to all investment advice. This role is assumed by either of our co-Heads of Sustainable Investment.
We continue to have senior input into all aspects of our sustainability approach, from internal operations, quality of communications (including this report), to public policy consultation responses. Progress against all public commitments made in regard to sustainability are reviewed on a regular basis by our Senior Leadership Team. This includes our B Corp status, assessing progress against our own net-zero commitment, and those commitments taken on as part of our memberships of the Investment Consultants Sustainability Working Group (ICSWG) and the Net-Zero Investment Consultants Initiative (NZICI).
As part of this report, we have outlined our progress against each pillar of the B Impact Assessment, and our scores from 2022 are included in full in the appendix. To reflect the changing governance structure of our firm, and more broadly ensure all our policies and procedures maintain a high standard, in 2023 we began what is an ongoing process of reviewing and updating our approach.
At Redington, our culture, people and how we treat one another is paramount. Our culture has evolved organically over our 18 years, yet throughout, it has remained anchored by three values:
Redington was founded on the principle of challenging the pensions industry to improve outcomes for end members. This still very much runs through our organisation and the way in which we operate. We challenge ourselves, each other, our clients and the industry to find better ways of doing things.
We want to foster an environment where colleagues feel empowered to speak up, respectfully challenge the status quo and learn from mistakes. We aim to provide the tools, training, support, coaching and mentoring, to give employees autonomy to enable them to thrive in current and future roles.
Redington’s generosity is what makes it such a special place to work. The whole firm aims to share knowledge, time, resources and best practices with each other, our clients, our sector and the broader industry at large.
To truly integrate these values across the firm, we deliberately devolve responsibility down the organisation. Our employee-led Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee works closely with our Leadership and People teams to ensure inclusivity is central to everything we do. Our People team provides channels for feedback to be heard and acted on through engagement surveys, focus groups and an anonymous suggestions box.
We challenge ourselves and the wider investment industry to follow best practices with respect to inclusion and diversity because, not only is this the right thing to do, we know this helps improve the service we deliver to our clients. For example, we actively try to source candidates from diverse backgrounds to ensure that we bring in new colleagues to help us think and work differently.
We’re currently working with the following initiatives:
Just as we’re constantly learning and seeking to improve, we’re also keen to share what we know, be transparent about what we think has worked for us, and the things that haven’t. In this vein, we’ve co-founded and continue to help steer industry groups such as the Investment Consultants Sustainability Working Group (ICSWG) and the Net Zero Investment Consultants Initiative (NZICI).
We continue to publish our gender pay gap voluntarily as part of our efforts to promote transparency about this issue across the financial services industry and to challenge ourselves to continue to improve.
We are pleased to share that our gender pay gap fell in 2023 compared to the figures reported last year. In 2023, our mean hourly pay gender pay gap was 3.2%, and median 8.5%, down from 12.8% and 18.7% in 2022 respectively. Unfortunately, our mean and median gender pay gap in bonuses rose over the year to 32.6% and 36.8%, from 26% and 19.3%.
Whilst we are encouraged by the progress made so far, we realise there is work still to be done. We were proud that our recent graduate intake increased gender representation in more junior levels but expect this to increase our gender pay gap when we report it next year. Nevertheless, recruiting women graduates is key to increasing gender representation in the mid-levels of our organisation, where we acknowledge gender representation is currently lacking. To improve on this, we are committed to fair and equal opportunity practices especially regarding assignments and promotions.
In last year’s report we were pleased to share that our scoring on the Community pillar of the B Impact Assessment was notably above that of our peer group. Nevertheless, we remain committed to fostering meaningful relationships with our stakeholders, including regulators. The breadth of our work in this area is shown through the number of consultation responses we submitted over the year, outlined in full later in this report.
In particular, we were delighted to respond to the Financial Conduct Authority’s consultation on diversity and inclusion in the financial sector, supporting the regulator’s focus on this area and sharing our perspectives on the current problems and how they might best be addressed.
Redington’s purpose upholds across the entire team.
Sustainability considerations are embedded into everyone’s responsibilities, regardless of which function they undertake, but how this is embedded and manifests is different for each role and each individual. For example, our Manager Research colleagues and client-facing teams will embed material sustainability considerations into their work for our clients, while our Operations team will consider the environmental and social impacts of facilities management and procurement.
Our team is encouraged to undergo training and our size and autonomous culture mean that any individual can readily approach our sustainability specialists for advice and input. We also encourage our employees to study for various qualifications, including the CFA UK’s Certificate in ESG Investing or Certificate in Climate Investing. In the second half of 2023, two of our employees took part in the successful pilot of the CFA UK’s new Certificate in Impact Investing, an opportunity made available to us because of our ongoing contributions to the Society’s work. In 2023, c.17% of our employees were studying towards a professional qualification of their choice.
Over 2023 we continued to grow our dedicated Sustainable Investment team, hiring two new specialists to bring the team to eight full-time members. Collectively, these individuals have more than 50 years’ sustainable investment and stewardship experience and ensure that our clients benefit from a unique resource and skill-base.
Importantly though, it is not only our specialists that work on sustainable investment. Everyone is expected to be able to support clients in their stewardship and sustainability decision-making. In 2023 we continued to upskill our colleagues in the Investment Consulting team and wider organisation through “Lunch & Learn” sessions run by the Sustainable Investment team, covering market context, upcoming sustainable regulation and case studies of recent client projects. We also began hosting drop-in sessions for sustainable investment-related client questions. In the spirit of cross-team collaboration, in 2023 our Sustainable Investment specialists worked closely with equity Manager Research experts to agree our preferred managers in the passive equity space, with a detailed focus on their stewardship capabilities.
ESG reporting analytics continues to be integrated across our modelling capabilities and delivered as standard by our Modelling team. We use sustainability data on climate metrics and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from market-leading data providers MSCI and Impact Cubed, enabling us to share considered insights with our clients. Keeping abreast of evolving best practice, over 2023 our Modelling team worked to incorporate stress tests developed by the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial Systems (NGFS) into client advice, and we are already considering how to move ahead with scenario analysis that reflects the insights of the team from Exeter University who have identified limitations in the NGFS approach. In a similar vein, and looking ahead to evolving themes, we also reviewed the best way to deliver nature-based metrics to our clients, trialling both Nature Alpha and MSCI metrics, before choosing the latter to help a client assess their nature-based risk.
Our aim of delivering sustainable investment advice effectively across our client base and firm is reflected in the following firmwide performance objectives: “embed sustainable investment into research”, “embed sustainable investment into advice” and “embed sustainability into operations”. Implementing these objectives means that our employees are fully incentivised to support clients with their sustainable investment and stewardship requirements, as delivery against them influences annual appraisals, bonuses and promotions.
Despite scoring above our peers on the Workers pillar of the B Impact Assessment, last year we noted that we were exploring ways our people policies could be enhanced further. The below case study outlines how we did this. We will continue to review our policies for further improvements.
Over 2023, we were proud to agree a standalone neurodiversity policy and formalised speaking-up policy.
In designing the former, we consulted with our employees who were either neurodivergent themselves or had close family members who were. We also spent a lot of time researching how other companies were supporting their neurodiverse employees and took inspiration from that to see what more we could be doing. Importantly, the policy does not replace our equal opportunities policy or diversity, equity, and inclusion policy – both of which refer to disability inclusion – but further enhances and emphasises what we already have in place.
By far the largest impact we can have in the world is through supporting our clients to be conscious of their impact on people and planet while delivering the investment returns they need to fulfil the expectations of their members and beneficiaries, importantly helping them to reduce those impacts over time.
But we take our own footprint seriously too. We chose our current offices for their low impact and their sustainability credentials – as well as our scope to influence further improvements. We buy recycled and recyclable supplies, and are actively cutting our printing activities, as well as measuring our precise paper usage and financing tree planting to ensure reforestation to reflect this footprint. We benefit from greywater harvesting and electricity efficiency features, notably reducing our power usage. We were delighted when, after continued encouragement, our landlord switched in early 2023 to 100% renewable power.
We actively assess our carbon footprint across scopes 1, 2 and 3, including our employees’ commutes and business travel, and have committed to offset the carbon emissions that we cannot eliminate, but still strive to reduce. We continue to buy the highest quality of offsets and over-purchase to provide a further buffer of assurance.
In the spirit of making 100 million people financially secure – for the benefit of people and planet – in lieu of paper cards to clients for the festive season, in 2023 we planted 5,000 trees. Last year we committed to enhancing our approach in this area, and the Environment pillar of the B Impact Assessment, by working with our building landlords to ensure we’re maximising opportunities for recycling. We are pleased that over 2023 we were able to reduce our waste by 47%.