By: Guy Hudson
Read the Stonehage Fleming Stewardship Report
Watch the rest of the series:
There are 12 principles to the UK Stewardship code,
all of which going into some detail as to how we can demonstrate that we are
adopting the sort of practices that are going to, uh,
generate those positive outcomes that we refer to for clients. On the one hand,
uh, and for the Economy Environment, society on the other, but it,
we should say it's not, uh,
a given that even by making your submission to
the Financial Reporting Council that you are actually going to have that
approved. They set a very high standard,
they give us all sorts of constructive feedback on, uh,
our submission and areas in indeed in which we can improve.
So we were incredibly proud to have achieved approval
by the Financial Reporting Council of our stewardship me submission
at the first time of asking.
Our task now is to repeat that and do it again,
not just this year, but in all future years.
And the journey that we have been on since 2019 when we started to take
this really seriously has really been quite profound.
And we've gone from really having a position of,
of trying to find out where we should be positioning ourselves as a business now
to embedding this on a day-to-day basis as a business as usual
considerations. So on one hand, if we're talking about, um,
investment considerations,
that means how we engage with the companies in which we invest
and how we engage with those managers with whom we place
capital for investments. So if you think about it, and we,
we express this in the stewardship report.
We have external expertise and we have internal expertise.
External expertise is when we outsource the management of client assets
by identifying other third party investment managers who we believe,
uh, have, are the right caliber. And crucially now for the stewardship code,
have the right principles to be able to deploy that capital effectively.
Internal expertise is when we invest directly in companies,
and there it is a matter of in engaging directly with the companies in which
we invest to make sure that they are following the right
principles of governance,
that they are treating the environment in a responsible and sustainable way,
and we can therefore place our capital with them and demonstrate that we are
being responsible investors in so doing.