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During 2019, we held over 1400 meetings with prospective or investee companies. Of these, 358 met our definition of engagement. Approximately one third of those meetings were thematic and 19 were focused on UN Global Contact violations. They covered 231 companies across regions and sectors. The majority had global operations and supply chains but were headquartered in developed markets.

In 2019, we introduced an enhanced internal tracking system to assess the progress of dialogue against defined engagement objectives. As this is a new metric and for some of our engagements formalized engagement objectives have only recently been introduced, we expect future reporting to record increased numbers in terms of engagement progress.

In relation to proxy voting decisions, almost one third of our engagements provided useful and tangible insights.

We engaged with companies individually and in collaboration with other investors. Collaborating with peers helped us convey one consistent message to companies on systemic issues which could severely impact financial markets (i.e. climate change). 13% of our 2019 engagements were collaborative.

52% of our engagement meetings were held with the CEO/CFO or another C-suite representative. In approximately 34% of cases we met the Chair or an independent Board member. 31% of our engagement meetings were conducted with an ESG expert, such as the head of the sustainability department.

Topics addressed during our engagements

Our dialogue with companies covered a wide range of topics as the chart below illustrates. A large proportion of the engagements focused on governance, remuneration, business strategy and capital management.

One engagement meeting will likely address more than one topic. In total we held 358 engagements in 2019.