Our sustainability framework

We believe that business can be a force for good and that we’ve a responsibility to look for ways to contribute more directly to the creation of solutions. We know that as guardians of our clients’ capital and their investments we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. We’ve set ourselves stretching goals to embed sustainability throughout our global business.

Our approach has been to embrace corporate sustainability and to recognise that long-term value can only be achieved when we factor the environmental, social, and economic impacts of our business decisions. For us, corporate sustainability means taking responsibility for our actions and being proactive in reducing our impact, whether that is through the reduction of our carbon footprint, ensuring compliance to regulatory requirements, ensuring we treat our people, not only fairly but equitably and that we actively and consistently promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. It means acting ethically and in good faith with our stakeholders, clients, business partners and suppliers.

Our sustainability framework is based upon four key pillars – people, clients, planet, and strong governance. We believe that to thrive in the future, fairness and transparency must be entrenched into our governance systems. We hold ourselves accountable for our behaviours, our culture and the ethical standards we aspire to.

We value our people

We want our people to be able to be themselves, thrive and succeed

We value our clients

We commit to service excellence, working in conjunction with our clients to support them on their ESG journey. A key part of this is to support our clients as they formulate and evolve their ESG strategy in partnership with us

We value our planet

We aim to reduce our impact on our environment

We value strong governance

We strive to uphold ethical standards, manage our risks, and protect our stakeholders’ data

Each pillar connects to several functions. For example, “Our People” is not just about our HR teams, it connects with our employee-led networks and our CHESS (Community, Health, Environment, and Sports and Social) communities and has implications for how we structure our business. Each business function is responsible for its own strategy, but these must tie back to our overall ambition to being a more sustainable, diverse, equitable, inclusive and responsible business.

Each function measures its progress against its strategy, targets and KPIs. These are revised internally, and progress is reported on at least annually in this report.

Sustainable development goals

Our sustainability framework responds to the challenges we face as a society, which were set out in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We recognise the scale of these issues and are determined to play our part. As part of this commitment, we’ve begun to align our sustainability framework to the SDGs and provide a summary of our impact in the SDG section of the appendix later in this report.

External accreditations

By committing to the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and the Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI), we’ve strengthened our resolve to becoming a responsible and sustainable business and demonstrating to our people and to our clients that we’re serious about embracing sustainability and ESG.

UNGC

The UNGC embodies our philosophy on business conduct and our commitment to protecting labour and human rights, the environment and preventing corruption. We’ve been a participant of the UNGC since October 2021. Please follow this link to our UNGC page UNGC (IQ-EQ).

Principles for Responsible Investment

As part of our commitment to responsible investment we’ve signed up to the PRI as a service provider. As such we’re not obligated to report on our ESG performance, but we voluntarily disclose our progress and achievements in our annual sustainability report.

IQ EQ Fund Management (Ireland) Limited, an IQ EQ Group company is a signatory to the PRI as an Asset Manager and their public response is available here at PRI transparency report.

EcoVadis

In 2023 we were proud to be awarded a gold medal from EcoVadis, a leading platform that assesses the sustainability performance of companies across 175 countries and 200 industries annually. Their framework is based on several international sustainability standards including the UN Global Compact, UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), ISO 26000 standard, International Labour Organisation (ILO), and CERES Roadmap.

We were assessed across four themes, namely: environment, labour and human rights, business ethics, and procurement and the award position us among the top 5% of over 120,000 rated companies globally. We’re building on the this and are aiming to cement our status as a business that is serious about our commitment to corporate sustainability.

Our EcoVadis Scorecard

Overall score

96th Percentile

Environment

Ethics

Labour and Human Rights

Sustainable Procurement