AB Signatory to the UK Stewardship Code
AllianceBernstein (AB) is proud to have been accepted as a signatory to the UK Stewardship Code for the fourth consecutive year. The Code sets high stewardship standards for those investing money on behalf of UK savers and pensioners, and those that support them.
To see the full list of signatories, please visit: https://lnkd.in/dSQF8XvG
AB’s Global Stewardship Statement and 2023 Report is a comprehensive overview of our activities in corporate responsibility, responsible investing, and stewardship. Because responsibility starts from the top, we begin this statement with our purpose and values, describing how our culture can enable both responsible investing and effective stewardship.
In the Statement, we describe how we set policy, consider material ESG risks and opportunities, and serve as active stewards in our investment-management services. We also highlight the progress we’ve made in implementing our responsibility strategy and discuss the achievements of the firm in further developing our governance structure and approach to DEI, as well as our progress in ESG integration, engagement, proxy voting, policy advocacy, and industry participation.
AB became a signatory to the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2011. This began our journey to formalize our approach to identifying responsible ways to unlock opportunities for our clients. We continue to develop differentiated insights and integrate material ESG considerations throughout most of our actively managed strategies (80% of our actively managed AUM as of March 31, 2024). Stewardship is fundamental to our responsible investment and research processes. When in the best interest of our clients, we engage with issuers on material topics. We also engage with nonprofits and other stakeholders, including but not limited to industry bodies, policymakers, academics, regulators, governments and community groups. Through engagements, we glean insight and encourage action. The insight we gain helps us to promote company and issuer behavior that is in the best interest of our clients and their financial goals. We encourage action that can lead to better identification and management of risks and opportunities, strategy, operations and, ultimately, results. Insight and action drive our ability to make decisions and generate enhanced risk-adjusted investment returns for our clients. As stewards of our clients’ assets, we believe that proxy voting is a fundamental responsibility. We vote our active and passive shareholdings and unit holdings in accordance with our proprietary, publicly available Proxy Voting and Governance Policy.
In 2023, the responsible investing space continued to mature. Investors around the world experienced heightened scrutiny of responsible investing, increasing greenwashing concerns and a tidal wave of regulation, including ESG-related regulation.
During the year, AB continued to strengthen our corporate responsibility practices, prioritize proprietary research and deliver innovative solutions for our clients. Consistent with our fiduciary duty to clients, we continued to focus our ESG integration efforts on identifying financially material risks and opportunities within our investment portfolios. We continued our efforts to recruit and retain valuable talent and foster a culture of differentiated insights. In 2023 we received a score of 100% on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index for the eighth consecutive year. We opened the doors of our new office in London, which has been awarded a Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) “outstanding” rating for being in the top 1% of UK domestic refurbishments. We expanded our employee benefit offerings to include wellness-oriented activities, and we enhanced our employee and management training programs, which focus on leadership development and career planning.
As an investor, we developed and enhanced partnerships that drove novel research and client solutions. Highlights include our collaboration with eCornell, Cornell’s external education unit, to deepen investor knowledge of our three social research priorities: a Changing World, a Just World and a Healthy World. We also continued our partnership with the Columbia Climate School, launching our Climate Change and Investment Academy 2023 to our clients and kicking off the Climate Change and Investment Curriculum for our investment teams. Finally, we developed our Climate Transition Alignment Framework (CTAF), which we are using to assess companies’ material climate-related risks and opportunities.
