Investor Responsibility Policy

Insight Investment's core business is investing in companies on behalf of a wide range of institutional and retail clients. We manage money for over 300 institutional clients and 3 million individuals. We are committed to working on behalf of our clients to encourage the companies in which we invest – across our equity and bond portfolios – to adopt high standards of corporate governance and corporate responsibility.

Our work is guided by our Corporate Governance and Corporate Responsibility Policy, which outlines the rationale for our approach and the strategies we use in pursuit of our goals.

In short, Insight is committed to proactively engaging with the companies in which we invest and to integrating corporate governance and corporate responsibility issues into our investment process for two reasons:

• We aim to protect and enhance investment returns where possible, taking all issues relevant to financial performance of companies in which we invest into account, and
  
• We believe we have a wider responsibility to ensure that companies in which we invest are managed responsibly, i.e. to high ethical, social and environmental standards.

Our experience has demonstrated that our investment returns can be enhanced by explicitly analysing and incorporating companies' performance on corporate governance and corporate responsibility issues into our investment process.  We also take the view that we can protect and, in some cases enhance, our clients’ investment returns by engaging with the companies in which we invest to encourage them to manage their key business risks and opportunities effectively. Some social, ethical and environmental issues have now come to be recognised as being material to companies’ financial returns, and thus to investment returns. This can be driven by new government legislation in areas such as waste and water management, financial incentives to companies to reduce or eliminate pollution, and consumer and media campaigns on sweatshop labour in the apparel and footwear industries to the growing demand for healthier foods.  These can all impact on companies' brands, reputation and value.

The second reason for playing such an active role is that we believe that shareholders as providers of capital to businesses have wider responsibilities to ensure that companies in which we invest achieve high standards of corporate responsibility. Specifically, we believe we have a duty to ensure that the boards and management of companies in which we invest operate according to prevailing corporate governance codes, stringent ethical policies and high environmental and social standards.

Implementing our Policy

We pursue our objective of encouraging best practice on governance, environmental and social issues in a variety of ways, including:

• Engagement: We regularly discuss corporate governance, strategy and relevant corporate responsibility issues with company board directors and executives. This dialogue occurs during regular meetings with fund managers, as well as in issue-specific meetings with our Investor Responsibility team.  We also engage with other key opinion formers such as company advisers, consultants, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and government officials to ensure that our knowledge on key issues is up-to-date and with a view to influencing debates.
  
• Benchmarking: We have developed particular expertise in conducting benchmarking projects to compare corporate performance on specific environmental and social issues. We find that the process of developing such benchmarks, the dialogue with companies, and the publication of the results, is a very effective means of stimulating better corporate performance.
• Collaboration: We often work with other institutional investors and with trade associations on issues of common interest. Our current affiliations can be found here.
• Investment integration: Given the increasing relevance of a range of environmental, social and governance issues to the financial performance of companies, we integrate analysis of these issues into our core investment processes. We analyse issues that are material to individual companies, and conduct in-depth research into major themes, such as climate change and access to water, that can significantly impact the longer-term structure of society and of economy – and thus, the financial performance of companies.
• Voting: We actively vote our clients’ shareholdings. We are able to vote on shares held in a range of markets including the UK, US, Europe, Japan, Pacific and emerging markets. Our governance and voting activities are informed by Insight’s membership of organisations such as the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN), the UK Social Investment Forum (UKSIF), the European Social Investment Forum (EuroSIF), the Association of British Insurers Investment Committee (ABI), the Institutional Shareholder's Committee and the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI), and our active participation in the formulation of these organisation’s policies and standards relating to corporate governance and corporate responsibility issues. 
• Communication: We publish regular briefings that set out our views on important environmental, social and governance issues both with regard to specific companies and more generally.
• Transparency: We believe that we have a clear duty to be accountable to our clients for the engagement, voting and other activities we carry out on their behalf. We also believe that we owe some accountability to the companies in which we invest, and we recognise that our customers and clients, regulators, the media and the wider public has a legitimate interest in the activities of institutional investors with regard to corporate governance and responsibility issues. We therefore have a policy commitment to transparency in relation to our engagement with companies and our voting recommendations. We publish details of our engagement and voting activities on a quarterly basis.

Insight's Voting Policy

Insight routinely votes on behalf of our client's with regard to all the UK companies we invest in, and on selective issues outside the UK.  Please click here to view our policy.