WHO WE ARE
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Our purpose & history
Our clients
Our strategy & client satisfaction
Managing conflicts
Since our foundation nearly 20 years ago, Redington has been a purpose-driven firm with a mission to help make 100 million people financially secure. Initially, we sought to revolutionise the UK pensions industry by managing risk to ensure that pension members received their benefits at retirement, on time and in full. This focus on beneficiaries has remained central as we have expanded our work into new jurisdictions and markets. Alongside that expansion we also extended our mission to encompass environmental and social matters – we now aim to help make 100 million people financially secure, for the benefit of people and planet.
In recent years, we have taken significant steps to embed sustainability at the core of our operations, recognising that financial security can only exist on a thriving planet and within a fair and just society. Moving into 2025 we embark on an exciting new stage of our journey. We are now part of the A.J. Gallagher family – an organisation with global reach and a purpose to support providers of benefits across the planet. The alignment of values between ourselves and Gallagher puts us both on a platform to thrive, building on the work we have committed ourselves to, taking it to new markets, industries and investor types.
As we navigate an increasingly challenging landscape, with extreme weather, rising emissions, environmental degradation, persistent inequalities, and escalating global conflicts, sustainable investment remains crucial in helping clients manage their investments.
Despite headwinds, we remain optimistic. We know we must adapt our advice to help our clients navigate an ever-changing and uncertain world. It is our role to do the right thing, to see past the noise, and help our clients position themselves to deliver for their beneficiaries. With a greater global footprint, we are closer than ever to delivering our mission.
Our business was established to provide top-quality advice to some of the largest and most complex UK Defined Benefit( DB) pension schemes. These clients still make up the largest portion of the asset owners and intermediaries we support, both by number and assets under advice.
We continued to diversify our client base in 2024 as part of ongoing plans to expand our offering to Defined Contribution (DC) pension schemes, local government pension funds, 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.
The themes of our advice in 2024 were a continuation of prior efforts, with the primary focus having been on the risks and opportunities of climate change, effective stewardship including engagement and voting, as well as other sustainable 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, while others hire us for a broader suite of advisory services.
2024 was the second year of a 3-year road map agreed by our 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 of the growing demand that we are seeing from clients.
As ever, we recognise that our success relies on the robustness of client relationships, which are founded on empowering them to make informed decisions in a complex and constantly changing 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, which remains strong compared to international benchmarks.
We aim to build further positive impact for our clients. As part of this, we continue to hold annual client service review meetings between our Deputy CEO and each of our clients to gain honest feedback about the delivery of our services – from the quality of reporting to the usefulness of advice. The feedback from these meetings is shared with the client-servicing teams as appropriate, to enable us to continue making improvements to 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.
2024 saw clients’ emphasis start to move from building the foundations of their sustainable investment approaches to taking steps to achieve their given objectives through articulating Climate Transition Plans. Another main area of focus for many of our clients was understanding what nature-related risks mean for their portfolios, and how they might start incorporating these themes into their climate-related strategies.
We continued to bring our Enhanced Stewardship Platform (ESP) to many clients. ESP allows users to look at how their fund managers are delivering stewardship on their behalf and, when progress is insufficient, challenge them using information backed by robust data and insightful analysis.
Over 2024 we worked with several of our clients on adding sustainable investment opportunities into their asset allocation mix. The newest asset class we researched and helped allocate client money towards was natural capital.
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, asset owners 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 conflicts by having procedural protections and requirements of clarity and disclosure by our staff. One of our core values is to Treat Customers Fairly. We take this extremely seriously, with any situations that might give rise to concern debated openly and honestly at our weekly Investment Strategy Committee. A key focus is to ensure that clients receive updates on developments in our advice at the same time; this gives them equal access to information for making timely decisions. This is of particular importance when we change investment manager ratings, where we may advise multiple clients to disinvest from downgraded managers.
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 fund managers, employees, appointed representatives or any person directly or indirectly linked to us and our clients.
We place the necessary constraints on gifts and entertainment that might be seen to create a conflict of interest, requiring appropriate transparency and disclosures from all employees.
