Wealth manager seeks better Equilibrium with ESG commitment
Cheshire wealth management firm Equilibrium Financial Planning has underpinned its commitment to ESG by signing up to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI).
The move means that Equilibrium’s sister company, Equilibrium Investment Management, will only invest with fund management groups who are themselves PRI signatories by end 2021 and will require that these firms have an average PRI score of “A” or above across certain criteria.
Should these fund management groups score below “A” within the active ownership, and strategy and governance categories, Equilibrium will require them to take action or will remove them from portfolios altogether.
Mike Deverell, partner and investment manager at Equilibrium, said: “ESG is spoken about a lot within the market – but it means different things to different people.
“We are concerned that many firms conduct what people now refer to as ‘greenwashing’, and it was why our approach has been more considered and careful.
“We have been working on this in the background for some time now; our values as a company mean that leaving the world and our community in a better place is our number one priority, and we want to make sure our investment portfolios reflect that.”
Equilibrium is a £10m-turnover business that manages close to £1bn of assets for more than 1,000 families. It has been in the top 10 of the Sunday Times Top 100 Best Small Companies to work for for the last four years.
Deverell added: “We believe the most important thing is to make sure we engage with the companies we invest with on ESG issues, and we incorporate it into all our investment decisions. We think UNPRI is a great initiative – what we like about it is that it’s a framework which will allow us to hold our fund management groups and ourselves to account.”
