Brunel Pension Partnership has published its 2024 Responsible Investment & Stewardship Outcomes Report.

The report outlined the annual progress made against seven priority themes on responsible investment in 2023, as well as its latest stewardship numbers and votes over the year. This revealed that Brunel voted at 99.8 per cent of AGM meetings, engaged 805 companies, had 121 public policy interactions, and instructed 1,331 meetings. Furthermore, it showed that Brunel worked to improve data and reporting, harness industry coordination on key themes and initiatives, influence public policy, maximise its engagement & voting impact, and improve its portfolios’ exposures, both to meet its clients’ ambitions and to encourage faster responsible investment & stewardship progress across the industry. In particular, Brunel introduced AI to stewardship evaluation, qualifying biodiversity impacts and dependencies through foot printing and tackling climate change from all angles. The pool also confirmed plans to share its Climate Progress Report in June, to demonstrate how it measured up against climate change policy 2023-2030 targets, set last year.

Broadstone has launched a new carbon footprinting service.

The tool aims to enable employers, trustees and asset owners to accurately measure, manage and monitor their corporate sustainability progress in line with increasing regulatory requirements. Measurements will be carried out by means of a carbon footprinting exercise, management and setting of reduction targets will be conducted via a carbon management plan, and monitoring will be carried out to see trends and quantify progress.

Canada Life has become the first provider to sign up to the new Origo annuity tracking service, Transfer Tracking.

Transfer Tracking is an application programming interface link created by Origo to connect annuity providers with brokers and advisers, showing live updates on individual cases throughout the purchase journey. The service aims to reduce the burden on advisers by minimising the need to chase and check the progress of annuity applications. This is in turn expected to help free up provider resource to help meet the ongoing demand for annuities.

Hargreaves Lansdown has launched a campaign to encourage retail investors to invest in the UK, which is set to run until the 30 June.

The campaign, named Get Investing in the UK, is aimed at highlighting the benefits of investing and present its best ideas on long-term investment opportunities in the UK. With a general election, potential IPOs, and interest rate cuts on the horizon, Hargreaves Lansdown said it sees this year as pivotal for UK investments. Despite the FTSE 100 hitting record highs, Hargreaves Lansdown head of investment analysis and research, Emma Wall, said that this presents opportunities for investors in the UK market and offers great value trading at 43.5 per cent discount to the US. Furthermore, the combination of growing dividends, significant share buybacks and the discount the UK market continues to trade on suggests it’s a good time to invest.

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