Aligning Stewardship with Asset Owner Expectations: How rezonanz Supports a Forward-Looking Approach
“From a systems change perspective, the engagement and voting behavior of large financial institutions remains an area that deserves particular attention from asset owners, irrespective of whether assets are externally or internally managed.”—February 13, 2025, Asset Owner Statement on Climate Stewardship
Amidst notable backtracking on climate collaboration and commitments in the past few months, the recent Asset Owner Statement on Climate Stewardship demonstrates why we’re convinced by the data from Morningstar showing that 67% asset owners globally believe that ESG has become more material to their investment process in the last five years. The letter, initially signed by 26 leading pension funds, sets forth five key principles for climate stewardship for asset managers to uphold underscores the growing urgency for effective, measurable stewardship in the investment industry.
With the launch of our global benchmarking of 140 asset managers and asset owners in November 2024, we’ve empowered asset owners with key insights into both their own voting behavior and that of their asset manager partners. With the launch of our “Voting for the Future” report on March 4th and webinar on March 18th we’ve focused on the voting records and voting policies of asset owners across six European markets, using our first-of-its-kind methodology to identify pension funds leading with respect to
· Climate
· Politics and lobbying
· Diversity, worker’s and human rights
· & Other Environmental and Social issues
We then extract best practices from these leaders’ publicly disclosed voting policies by conducting an in-depth qualitative review to derive actionable insights and identify the specific language that underpins these leaders' strong performance. This analysis highlights recurring themes and concrete provisions that other pension funds can adopt to enhance their proxy voting strategies and drive superior sustainability outcomes.
While this research will provide first-of-its-kind support to those asset owners seeking to do their homework for the assets they retain voting rights on, it will also benefit smaller pension funds dependent on external managers, as well as pension funds of all sizes ready to engage in stewardship pursuing systems change. Below we’ve outlined the ways our work directly supports asset owners’ monitoring activity across these critical key principles:
Principle 1: Industry/market and public policy engagement should be core to the climate stewardship proposition across asset classes
rezonanz approach: Currently our work in this area is somewhat limited by the state of disclosures around engagement with policymakers. In the meantime, we see voting and engagement with companies on the topic of politics and lobbying as a fundamental aspect of this topic.
Next steps: Our voting ranking is broken down into the five key topics above: by benchmarking investors’ votes on politics and lobbying-related items, we’re clarifying who is leading with respect to support of this topic with companies and is therefore most credibly positioned to expand their leadership. On the engagement side, we’re tracking the limited number of investors disclosing engagements with sovereigns in order to capture the initial movement in this area.
Principle 2: Where permissible, asset managers should prioritize collaborative initiatives to achieve greater impact and embed efficiencies in engagement activities
rezonanz approach: Within the scope of our engagement data-sharing initiative, we’re helping transform all engagements into collaborative engagements by empowering institutional investors to confidentially share their engagement data. Those opting in to sharing their data contribute to a global overview of engagement efforts (currently covering over 4,000 companies) and gain insights into how their activities and objectives align with broader industry trends. This groundbreaking initiative enhances transparency, efficiently aligns engagement strategies, and ensures more effective climate stewardship efforts at scale by enabling empirical comparative research into what’s working best.
Next steps: Our second annual engagement data-sharing initiative (covering 2024 engagements) launches in late March 2025. Visit the page to stay in the loop & indicate your pre-commitment to participation or to asking your external managers to participate.
Principle 3: Asset managers’ prioritization framework for company engagement should be rooted in a robust theory of change that delivers maximum impact
rezonanz approach: Given the fact that the “theory of change” approach has not yet been widely adopted as a standard stewardship report disclosure, we’re taking a quantitative approach to understanding engagement targeting. With our collection of over 150 institutional investors’ proxy voting records as well as over 45 investors’ engagement records, we’re convinced we have a broad base from which we can quantitatively model an understanding of where those efforts are being targeted, and the intensity with which the objectives are being pursued.
Next steps: In Q3 of this year, we’ll be sharing the insights gained from this research with rezonanz members (currently managing aggregate assets of over 6.8 trillion USD). Sign up today to stay in the loop
Principle 4: A systematic approach to voting is imperative
rezonanz approach: From our initial Voting for Sustainability ranking focused on the Swiss asset management market to our expanded global ranking of 140 asset managers and asset owners, our quantitative approach to assessing investors’ choices across hundreds of benchmark votes forms the core of our offering. By distilling proxy voting records into actionable insights, we bridge the gap between asset owner expectations and actual voting behavior, ensuring that asset managers represent their clients’ long-term interests. Climate is one of the five key topics for which our rankings offer an outside-in perspective, providing both an aggregate view—enabling the measurement of the gap between asset owners and asset managers—and individual insights into critical and differentiating votes.
Next steps: Our proxy voting monitoring software tracks the voting choices of over 80 asset managers on a daily basis, allowing more than 60 asset owners to compare their voting records side by side with their manager list for gap analysis in real time. Our comprehensive benchmarking report builds on the insights from our Voting for Sustainability ranking to provide tailored insights into benchmarking results vis-à-vis our universe of over 140 institutional investors managing over $54 trillion in assets. Ordering your 2025 benchmarking report by March 7th unlocks vote monitoring for AGM season 2025 and a 25% discount.
Principle 5: The stewardship function needs to be appropriately resourced
rezonanz approach: As UNPRI members, we defer in this matter to the Stewardship Resources Assessment Framework. This excellent resource was commissioned by the PRI from the Thinking Ahead Institute and published in May 2024. We recognize that stewardship requires proper resourcing. As highlighted in the Thinking Ahead Institute (TAI) Global Stewardship Resourcing Survey, one key metric to assess stewardship resourcing is by measuring stewardship costs as a percentage of total frontline and mid-office investment costs.
Next steps: If demand is sufficient by Q4, rezonanz plans to integrate collection of this metric into our data coverage, offering asset owners a transparent way to evaluate whether asset managers allocate sufficient resources to stewardship.
By aligning our work with these five key principles, rezonanz is helping asset owners hold asset managers accountable, optimize stewardship efforts, and drive real impact in climate action. We invite asset owners and asset managers to collaborate with us in building a more transparent, effective, and forward-looking stewardship landscape through a commitment to continuous improvement: benchmarking their voting performance and participating in our engagement pilot.
As of February 10th, 26 pension funds and pension fund organizations have stepped into a leadership role via signing the letter:
Border to Coast Pensions Partnership
Church of England Pensions Board
Environment Agency Pension Fund
Greater Manchester Pension Fund
London Pensions Fund Authority
North East Scotland Pension Fund
Northern Ireland Local Government Officers’ Superannuation Committee
School Sisters of Notre Dame Collective Investment Fund
Shell Contributory Pension Fund
Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent dePaul of New York
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