Driven by both voluntary and statutory initiatives, investors are finding it hard to keep up with disclosure requirements. In turn, reporting is quickly becoming a key resource challenge for investors, both in terms of people and technology.
Using Esgaia software, Storebrand is one of the first asset managers in the world to enable live reporting of engagement efforts on both entity and product-level directly via its website.
Summary
Using Esgaia technology, Storebrand has implemented live engagement disclosures via its website. Its primary objectives have been to;
save time and resources in reporting,
improve transparency, and
enable quicker information access to clients.
Storebrand can now easily create and manage their live disclosures directly via Esgaia’s software, including which funds, modules, and descriptions to apply. With a simple iframe code, they can add additional “embeds” to their website at any time.
- In this short case study, we outline the background, solution and implementation of this product.
Client
Storebrand Asset Management is a leading player in the Nordic market and a pioneer in the field of sustainable investments. We have been at the forefront of sustainable investing since the mid-1990s and are one of the founding signatories of the PRI. Storebrand AM is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Storebrand ASA, which is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The Storebrand Group dates back to 1767, and currently provides a wide selection of strategies under the brands of Storebrand, SKAGEN, Delphi, Storebrand Fonder, and Cubera, with a total AuM exceeding EUR 100 bn.
Challenge
Today, investors in most jurisdictions are expected to report on their engagement and voting activities to stakeholders. This information should be easy to access and understand by different user groups, and be provided on a regular basis. The regularity of such reporting is often annually, but this does not account for the increasing amount of other (ad hoc) requests from internal and external stakeholders.
With engagement disclosures being both quantitative and narrative-based, preparing and presenting data in different formats can therefore easily devour resources. As such, reporting has become one of the primary use cases of Esgaia’s software.
Solution
One of our commitments to clients is to help innovate to raise the overall technological level in the industry. This here is one such example, where the ambition has been to help ease investors’ reporting burden and demonstration of stewardship efforts.
This new web-based reporting format allows investors to further automate their reporting strategy by providing live engagement data through embeds/plugins on websites for both entity and product/mandate level disclosures.
At this point, it is particularly suitable for the more quantitative engagement insights, such as the number of engaged companies, engagements, activities, ESG category and topics. It is not intended to replace annual stewardship reports, but to enhance the overall reporting strategy and capacity.
Investor implementation
With Storebrand being the first client using live disclosures, Esgaia’s tech team collaborated with Stewardship professionals at their side to implement certain product enhancements.
Via Esgaia, Storebrand easily creates and manages their “live disclosures”, including which funds, modules, and descriptions to apply. By accessing a simple iframe code consisting of a couple of HTML-rows, Storebrand then smoothly integrated this data onto its own website.
Results
Together with Storebrand we strongly believe this provides an important building block to help save time and resources in reporting, improve transparency, and enable quicker information access to clients.
While the verdict is still out on measuring the longer-term outcomes of these objectives, one thing is clear: technology will only help to improve investors’ business and operational performance, this time by empowering their engagement management and reporting strategy.
Victoria Lidén, Responsible for active ownership & corporate governance at Storebrand Fonder AB:
- “I feel proud that we at Storebrand Fonder now can show our active ownership activities in a very transparent way. Anyone who is curious can at any time access the dashboard on our website and see which sustainability issues we have discussed with the companies in the respective fund, says Victoria Lidén. We will now continue our work with the support from Esgaia to further improve the tool and make more information available about our active ownership".
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