Corporate governance
At AEGON Asset Management, we aim to meet our clients’ investment expectations, while delivering excellent professional service. We are guided by the belief that good business performance must be accompanied by ethical business practices. We take our responsibilities seriously and apply the same principles to the companies we invest in.
Voting policy
Proxy Voting Report
A Strong Control Environment
We are committed to maintaining the highest standards of customer care and service within a strong control environment. We aim to ensure that our clients’ assets are securely maintained and all transactions are properly controlled. We aim to provide investors with clear assurance that our funds and services are proficiently managed and administered.
Key components of our control environment include our management committees, audit, monitoring and regulatory developments, business risk management and business continuity, policies and procedures, and human resources practices.
Best Practice
Our corporate governance policy supports the principles of the Combined Code in the UK and other recognised best practice guidance overseas. We actively register proxies at all AGMs and EGMs of the companies that we invest in the UK.
We regularly meet with the senior management of the companies we invest in to ensure they are being run in the best interests of shareholders. Additionally, our specialist corporate governance team work closely alongside our fund managers to monitor the performance of our investments.
We are also highly experienced ethical investors. Since 1989, we have offered investors funds designed to meet their needs for investment decisions based on strong ethical principles.
Capital Requirements
View the AEGON Asset Management Capital Requirements Directive Pillar 3 Disclosures - September 2008.
Responsible Investment Statement
We are mindful of our responsibilities as active managers and shareholders. As such, we endeavour to ensure that we identify and understand the key environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks for each of the companies, industries and sectors that we
invest in.
We do this because stakeholder expectations about the role of corporations in society are changing and also because we believe we have wider responsibilities to encourage high standards in the companies we invest in.
Poor social and environmental practices can affect a company’s financial performance, either through damage to a company’s reputation or the payment of regulatory fines, compensation, damages or other liabilities. Conversely, in the right market, corporate responsibility activities can lead to greater operational efficiency and/or competitive advantage. In our experience, a company’s ESG performance is best considered within the context of its industry’s competitive landscape, in relation to its peers and the geographic regions in which it operates.
AEGON Asset Management is a signatory to and member of, a number of initiatives and organisations working on specific environmental, social and governance issues so that we can better understand the ESG risks that companies face. We aim to identify key issues and engage with companies to encourage adoption of best practice.
AEGON Asset Management is also a signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, the principal investor initiative to drive the integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues into investment decision making. The Principles’ place a formal requirement on signatories to be active, responsible shareholders and report annually on activities and progress in a transparent manner.