Asset owners: 5 signs your stewardship programme needs better infrastructure

Your stewardship programme is growing. Your team is conducting more engagements. You're working with more external managers. Collaborative initiatives are multiplying. The FRC's expectations are rising.

But is your operational infrastructure keeping pace?

Many asset owners are running increasingly sophisticated stewardship programmes on infrastructure built for a simpler era - spreadsheets, shared drives, and email threads. It worked when stewardship was a small side programme. It doesn't work anymore.

Here are five signs it's time to upgrade your stewardship infrastructure.

1. You're spending more time consolidating data than analysing it

The symptom: Your team spends days each quarter chasing engagement reports from external managers, then more days manually consolidating them into a coherent view.

What it looks like in practice:

• Monday: Email all 12 external managers requesting quarterly engagement updates

• Tuesday-Wednesday: Chase the six who haven't responded

• Thursday-Friday: Receive reports in wildly different formats (PDFs, Excel, PowerPoint, some just email text)

• Next Monday-Wednesday: Manually enter data into your master spreadsheet

• Thursday: Realise Manager 7's data doesn't match the format, start reformatting

• Friday: Finally have a consolidated view, but now it's time to start on next month's board report

  
  

One stewardship lead at a UK pension fund told us: "I calculated that I spend 30% of my time on data consolidation. That's not why I got into stewardship work."

This mirrors broader challenges facing institutional investors. Research shows that up to 73% of all data remains unused for analytics, underscoring missed strategic opportunities, whilst analysts are being flooded with data, with incoming data being unstructured, chaotic, and disorganised.

The real cost: Whilst you're wrestling with Excel formatting, you're not asking the important questions: Are our climate engagements actually driving change? Which managers are delivering the most value? Should we escalate this underperforming engagement?

What good infrastructure enables: Automatic data ingestion from managers in any format, normalised into a single standardised view. Your team sees everything in real-time without lifting a finger. Those consolidation days become analysis days.

2. When someone goes on holiday, engagements fall through the cracks

The symptom: Critical follow-ups are missed because they live in someone's inbox or personal task list.

What it looks like in practice:

Sarah led an engagement with a FTSE 100 company on supply chain transparency. The company committed to publish a supplier audit report by Q3. Sarah goes on annual leave in August. The commitment isn't tracked anywhere visible to the team. Q4 arrives, the report hasn't materialised, and no one followed up because no one else knew about the commitment.

This happens constantly with engagement programmes managed through email and individual to-do lists. The institutional memory lives in people's heads and inboxes rather than in a system.

The real cost: Missed follow-ups undermine your credibility with portfolio companies. When you don't hold companies accountable to their commitments, they learn that commitments don't matter. Your engagement effectiveness plummets.

What good infrastructure enables: Every engagement has a clear owner, but all engagements are visible to the team. Commitments are tracked as tasks with due dates and automated reminders. When Sarah goes on holiday, the system reminds her colleague Tim that the supplier report is due. Nothing falls through the cracks.

3. Preparing your stewardship code report feels like starting from scratch

The symptom: It's March, and you're facing the annual Stewardship Code reporting deadline with dread.

What it looks like in practice:

You need to demonstrate engagement activity across your entire programme, both internal and external managers. This means:

• Reviewing 12 months of emails to find engagement records

• Re-reading quarterly reports from all your managers

• Manually categorising engagements by theme (climate, diversity, governance, etc.)

• Finding specific examples of "engagement outcomes" by searching through scattered documentation

• Building case studies from memory and old notes

• Cross-referencing everything to make sure you haven't missed major activities

It takes your team three weeks of intense work. When the FCA asks for evidence of a specific engagement outcome, it takes two days to locate the documentation.

The FRC has recognised the burden this creates. In July 2024, the FRC announced immediate changes to significantly reduce the reporting burden on existing signatories to the UK Stewardship Code, acknowledging that the reporting requirements had become too onerous. The UK Stewardship Code 2026 aims to reduce administrative burdens by an estimated 20-30% through streamlined reporting structures.

The real cost: Beyond the time burden, you're probably understating your impact because you literally can't find records of all your activities. And the lack of systematic documentation creates regulatory risk if scrutiny intensifies.

What good infrastructure enables: Your Stewardship Code report preparation becomes dramatically easier. Every engagement conducted throughout the year—by your team and your managers - is already in one place, categorised, tagged, and outcome-documented.

When you need examples of climate engagement success or evidence of manager oversight, you can filter and find them instantly. You're still writing the narrative, but you're not hunting through emails and spreadsheets for the underlying data. The three-week project becomes a three-day project.

4. You can't answer simple questions about your programme without a data archaeology project

The symptom: Your CIO asks "How many climate engagements did we conduct last quarter?" and you don't have an immediate answer.

Common questions you should be able to answer instantly but can't:

• How many engagements are we currently conducting on Labour Rights?

• Which of our external managers is most active on governance issues?

• What percentage of our engagements have achieved their stated objectives?

• How many portfolio companies have we engaged multiple times on the same issue?

• What's the average time from first engagement to successful outcome?

• Which collaborative initiatives are we participating in, and what's our role in each?

These aren't exotic analytics questions. They're basic programme oversight questions that any well-run function should be able to answer in seconds.

If your response is "I'll need to pull that together and get back to you," your infrastructure is failing you.

The FCA has made clear that effective stewardship requires this level of visibility. If stewardship can be made even marginally more effective for the nearly £8 trillion in assets managed by UK asset managers, the benefits to investors and to wider society could be significant.

The real cost: You can't manage what you can't measure. Without basic visibility into your programme metrics, you're flying blind. You can't identify what's working, what's not, or where to focus resources for maximum impact.

What good infrastructure enables: Real-time dashboards that show programme metrics at a glance. Filter by theme, manager, portfolio company, time period, or engagement stage. Answer oversight questions in seconds, not days. Export the data you need for reports and analysis instantly. Make data-driven decisions about where to focus your stewardship resources.

5. Managing collaborative engagements feels like herding cats

The symptom: You're participating in a collective engagement with 11 other investors, and coordination is chaotic.

What it looks like in practice:

You're part of a collaborative climate engagement with seven asset owners targeting major industrial companies. The coordination happens through:

• Email chains with 16 participants (multiple people from each organisation)

• A shared Google Doc for meeting notes that's constantly out of sync

• Bilateral calls to figure out who's doing what

• Confusion about which investor is leading the next meeting

• Uncertainty about whether follow-up actions have been completed

• No clear view of overall progress towards the engagement objective

Someone suggests a "coordination call" to get everyone aligned. Scheduling it takes two weeks. The call produces more action items tracked in more emails and more spreadsheets.

Three months in, you've lost track of what the company actually committed to and who's responsible for following up.

The real cost: Collaborative engagements are powerful- they carry more weight with companies and pool expertise across investors. But poor coordination undermines that power. Companies sense the disorganisation and become less responsive. Investor participants get frustrated and disengage.

What good infrastructure enables: Shared engagement workspaces where all participating investors can see the engagement objective, current progress, upcoming actions, and who's responsible for what. Task assignments with clear owners. Meeting notes in one place. Document sharing. Status updates visible to all. Coordination happens in the platform, not through endless email threads.

The common thread: Infrastructure built for yesterday's stewardship

All five of these symptoms stem from the same root cause: stewardship programmes have grown more sophisticated, but the operational infrastructure hasn't kept pace.

Ten years ago, stewardship might have been two people doing engagements with a dozen companies. Spreadsheets and email worked fine.

Today's stewardship programmes involve:

• Multiple internal team members

• Numerous external managers each conducting hundreds of engagements

• Participation in multiple collaborative initiatives

• Increasingly demanding regulatory reporting requirements

• Growing trustee and board scrutiny of stewardship effectiveness

• Rising expectations from beneficiaries and stakeholders

The regulatory environment reinforces this. The FRC is working closely with other regulators such as the FCA, the Department for Work and Pensions, and The Pensions Regulator to consider the impact of multiple regulatory requirements. Asset owners face overlapping expectations from multiple bodies, all requiring robust documentation and evidence of stewardship effectiveness.

You can't run this on yesterday's infrastructure.

What modern stewardship infrastructure looks like

The good news: solving these problems doesn't require massive IT projects or complex implementations. Modern stewardship infrastructure is:

• Centralised: One place where all engagement activity lives - both your internal team's work and your external managers' activities.

• Collaborative: Team members can see each other's work, assign tasks, share documents, and coordinate seamlessly. External partners can participate in collective engagements through shared workspaces.

• Automated: Data flows in automatically from external managers in whatever format they provide. Reports generate with a few clicks rather than days of manual work.

• Intelligent: The system helps you track outcomes, measure effectiveness, identify patterns, and make data-driven decisions about where to focus resources.

• Audit-ready: Complete documentation and audit trails for every engagement, meeting regulatory requirements without extra work.

The question isn't whether to upgrade - it's when

Stewardship expectations will continue rising. The FRC will keep turning up the scrutiny. Beneficiaries will demand more evidence of impact. Your programme will keep growing.

Operating on inadequate infrastructure will get progressively more painful.

The teams that invest in proper infrastructure now will have a significant advantage: they'll spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on strategic stewardship. They'll demonstrate effectiveness more convincingly. They'll manage risk more effectively. They'll scale their programmes without scaling their headcount proportionally.

The teams that wait will find themselves drowning in operational complexity, unable to demonstrate the impact they're actually achieving, and vulnerable when regulatory scrutiny intensifies.

Taking the first step

If you recognised your team in three or more of these symptoms, it's time to evaluate your stewardship infrastructure.

The first step is simple: audit how your team actually spends their time. Track for one month:

• Hours spent consolidating data vs. analysing it

• Hours spent on Stewardship Code reporting preparation

• Engagements or follow-ups that were missed or delayed

• Time to answer basic oversight questions from leadership

• Pain points in collaborative engagement coordination

Once you see the true cost of inadequate infrastructure, the business case for upgrading becomes clear.

Your stewardship programme deserves infrastructure that matches its ambitions.

Want to see what modern stewardship infrastructure looks like in practice? Book a demo to see how leading UK pension funds and asset managers companies are managing their programmes more effectively.