Research suggests investors spend 20 % of stewardship resources on reporting, which makes it a significant undertaking for investors. Effective stewardship reporting is therefore important not only to ensure stakeholders understand how you influence your investees and broader sphere of influence, but also, more importantly, to free up time for actual engagement activities. In this blog, we highlight some of the challenges and explain how Esgaia can help you become more productive and save time in stewardship reporting.
Market insights
In a UN PRI report with insights from reported signatory data, it is noted that around 80% have policies and guidelines on stewardship, but only 60% provide regular reporting to their clients / beneficiaries on their stewardship-related commitments. Furthermore, in the aforementioned TAI report, organisations with lower ambition levels allocated more resources to stewardship reporting, and generally, surveyed investors would partly prioritise improved reporting with additional resources. Thus, many agree on how reporting represents an area for efficiency improvements across the industry.
Challenge & Goals
Just like proxy season, the reporting season is a period in which stewardship professionals spend a lot of time on reporting, either by working longer hours, or hitting the pause button on other things. This is just speaking of the annual disclosures, and not counting the interim updates, internal reporting, client-specific reports, and ad-hoc requests throughout the year. Needless to say, stewardship professionals and investment management staff spend significant time on reporting.
Most will agree then, that this is not particularly rewarding work. Repetitive and data-heavy, it oftentimes requires the Excel wizard hat, only to still worry about data quality, and having to chase colleagues for missing data and insights. This, while having a million other things to do, which risks leading to a feeling of inadequacy, or prioritising poorly, which may or may not come up in performance evaluations. If this resonates, then keep reading.
How effective your approach is here will depend a lot on data recording, management and reporting capabilities. The goal must be to implement resources and ways of improving this situation, so that staff feel empowered, productive and confident in the process. However, many still use spreadsheets and different office tools in their engagement management to record data, monitor objectives and structure statistics. Here we’ll let you think of related Pros and Cons and how it affects your work.
Esgaia’s solution
Esgaia’s engagement management platform empowers investors to centralise stewardship data, optimise workflows, and simplify reporting. About the aforementioned challenges, our reporting capabilities address a primary use case and value add for our clients. With Esgaia:
stewardship data can be accessed on the platform and exported in different formats, including through Excel/CSV, PDF case studies, or system integrations,
analytics features and graph library empowers you to save filters and automate exports across organisational, portfolio, entity and objective-level,
the Engagement Disclosure Service can help expand your reporting strategy by displaying data via website plugins. See our client Storebrand Asset Management’s EDS here.
With our engagement management platform, investors save significant time and resources in reporting. As one of our clients commented in a separate case study, Viktoria Voskressenskaia, Sustainability analyst, Öhman Fonder:
- "With Esgaia's software, we improve our stewardship data management, saving valuable time and resources. The systematic tracking of our stewardship efforts enhances our reporting strategy and responsiveness to client requests amid increasing scrutiny from stakeholders”.