People want to know how their pension affects the world on a social and non-financial level and do not just want to focus on their financial performance, according to Scottish Widows master trust & proposition lead Sharon Bellingham.
Bellingham told conference delegates: “As well as showing how their funds are performing financially, it’s also about the social impact and the non-financial impact that their pensions have on the wider world.”
Demonstrating Widows’ member engagement ESG tool ‘Find Your Impact’, Bellingham said the app collects scheme-level insights for employers, increasing employee awareness of the importance of ESG issues and ensuring appropriate investment options. It also provides trustees with insights into membership perspectives on ESG and drives investment engagement and strategy for Scottish Widows based on member priorities.
Members can view their fund’s carbon footprint, which is based on how much companies within the fund emit gases like carbon dioxide and methane. They can also view the diversity of the company’s board, covering areas like race, age, and gender. The app also gives a percentage of how much waste from those companies goes to landfills, which is adjusted for company size.
Scottish Widows take-to-market specialist Robert Cochran added: “We can ask everyone in the scheme what they think we should do and how we should vote. The reason we’ve done our own tool rather than go elsewhere is because we wanted to integrate it within our app and have some control over the questions that we asked.
