How we vote

We’re committed to voting in the best interests of our clients.

Investing in companies includes the right to vote at shareholder meetings and voting is part of our active ownership activity. It’s how we exercise our ownership rights and can be an effective technique in signalling our views to companies and furthering our engagement objectives, should we feel we need to escalate.

On behalf of our clients, we vote to hold management and boards to account and ensure they’re managing the business for the long term. We do this to create, sustain and protect the value of our clients’ money.

Responsible for being good stewards of companies

As active owners we vote on all resolutions at all shareholder meetings globally, unless we are restricted from doing so. Our house voting policy is refreshed annually to capture market changes and evolving best practice.

Voting decisions are made using a framework developed by our Active Ownership team. Our team includes experts with local market knowledge who collaborate with the wider Sustainable Investment team, as well as our investment professionals on key resolutions.

We’re committed to voting in the best interests of our clients and see taking a considered approach to voting as part of our fiduciary duty, as well as a key part of the investment process.

That is why we do not rely solely on third party recommendations and use both external and our own proprietary research and consider resolutions on a case-by-case basis.

Topics

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. The value of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up, and you (or your clients) might not get back what you originally invested.