Benefits Guru has announced its latest financial wellness ratings for workplace pension providers, benchmarking providers in categories with and without open finance.

The group announced that Aviva, Fidelity, Hargreaves Lansdown, Scottish Widows and Standard Life achieved an overall gold rating in the financial wellness without open finance category, while Aviva, Mercer, Scottish Widows and Standard Life were awarded gold in the financial wellness with open finance category. The ratings were designed to help benefits consultants, cooperate advisers and employers review products that will improve member and employee outcomes and help improve financial resilience and wellness. The highest number of gold ratings were awarded in the vulnerable customer section, which Benefits Guru highlighted as demonstration of how seriously providers take this matter and are striving to address customers’ concerns.

Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) has published its Active Ownership Annual Report, revealing increased engagement in nature, health, and artificial intelligence.

The annual report outlined the way LGIM engages and votes regarding companies over the year, highlighting a growing focus on climate, nature, people, health, governance, and digitisation. The report confirmed that LGIM’s investment stewardship team cast 149,000 votes at 15,580 meetings to drive long-term, systemic change on environmental, social and governance-related risk factors. In particular, LGIM worked to expand the scope of its environment engagements, with vote sanctions against 100 companies for failing to meet deforestation expectations, while 342 companies were subject to voting sanctions through LGIM’s Climate Impact Pledge. 2023 was also a record year for climate-related shareholder proposals, with LGIM voting on 145 climate-related proposals, supporting 77 per cent of these. Looking ahead, LGIM also confirmed that it will be further increasing its expectations of mining and energy companies in 2024.

The Access Pool has announced that it is looking to appoint two private equity allocators, as part of the third phase of its private markets programme.

The pool has been "steadily" adding private market assets to its investable universe, most recently through real estate and infrastructure. The appointed private equity allocators will oversee a multi-vintage programme where authorities will commit to vintages on an ongoing basis over the term of the mandate. Each vintage will have global diversification, with investments across co-investments, primary funds, and secondary funds. The contracts will be obtained through tender, carried out as a two-stage restricted procedure.

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