Sustainability and Responsible Investment

1. Helping clients achieve their investment goals. Our fundamental role as investment managers is to help savers and investors achieve their investment goals – whether financial or non-financial. And, recently, policymakers have become more interested in how investment managers can help investors achieve their non-financial goals. 
2. Industry-led innovation and competitiveness. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to responsible investment. It’s an evolving, growing, dynamic market with diverse approaches, investment strategies, and a range of investment products designed to meet different responsible investing goals. While different policy and regulatory initiatives focus on different aspects of the sustainability and responsible investment agenda, it’s important to the industry that the collective impact of different regulations is not to limit innovation or investor choice. 
3. Policymakers requiring disclosure of sustainability information. Senior policymakers and the public are increasingly aware that all investments have some impact on society and environment – negative or positive, intentional or incidental. With this in mind, investment managers are being required to disclose how their investments measure up against sustainability indicators across their full range of investment strategies. We’ll need to work closely with governments and regulators to achieve useful and comparable disclosure methodologies against wider sustainability indicators or measurements.  

The Investment Association’s industry-led initiatives  

At the IA, we’re working closely with our member firms to promote responsible investment. Above all, we’re helping firms think about their wider role in society and the environment. 

Our work has focused on the following:

• Supporting the development of climate-related disclosure to bring greater clarity and comparability to the different responsible investment approaches our firms carry out.  
• Improving how our firms communicate the ways in which they take sustainability matters into account.  
• Supporting Race to Zero and the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative to help investment managers deliver on their net zero ambitions. To date, IA members responsible for more than three-quarters of UK assets under management (£7trn) have signed up to the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative.
• Working together with UK Government to bring about transition by creating investible opportunities like the UK sovereign green bond and setting out sector-specific pathways for transition.

The FCA’s Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) and Investment Labels

In November 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published its Policy Statement (PS23/16) on Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) and investment labels. The Policy Statement sets out the FCA’s final rules on anti-greenwashing, a new labelling regime, naming and marketing rules, product and entity level disclosures, as well as distributor obligations.

The IA is running numerous workstreams across the breadth of the FCA's rules on SDR and investment labels. To view our latest publications, please click the button below.