Turning stewardship from a cost centre to growth engine

For much of the last decade, stewardship was often treated as a necessary cost - a “best practice” checkbox rather than a strategic advantage.

Today, that framing is being quietly but decisively reversed.

Asset owners are no longer asking whether managers have a stewardship policy. They are asking whether stewardship quality can be demonstrated, evidenced, and trusted. Increasingly, the answer to that question is shaping where capital flows.

Stewardship has become a strategic imperative

The shift is visible in the data: PwC’s 2024 Stewardship Investor Survey found that 72% of investors expect their stewardship activities to have a meaningful impact on investment performance over the next three to four years. Stewardship is no longer peripheral to investment outcomes - it’s being evaluated as a material contributor to value.

At the same time, expectations on stewardship teams continue to rise. Engagement volumes are increasing, reporting demands are expanding, and scrutiny from asset owners and consultants is intensifying.

Yet resourcing is not keeping pace.

Large managers illustrate the scale of the challenge. State Street Global Advisors reported conducting over 1,300 company engagements across more than 45 countries in a single year - activity that cannot be sustained through spreadsheets, email threads, and institutional memory alone.

This is where the old stewardship operating model begins to break down.

Asset owner scrutiny is now explicit - and has real consequences

The stakes have become unmistakably clear.

A coalition of 38 asset owners representing more than $2.3 trillion in assets has set out explicit expectations for climate stewardship, including prioritisation, escalation, and accountability.

Mandates have already been reviewed or withdrawn at major managers - including BlackRock - amid concerns about stewardship and ESG approaches. Asset owners are making clear that commitment alone is no longer sufficient. They expect stewardship to be structured, consistent, and evidenced.

In a market where trillions of dollars are allocated through competitive RFPs, this isn't just a reputational issue. It's a revenue issue.

What asset owners are really asking now

In manager selection and review processes, stewardship questions have evolved significantly.

Yesterday’s questions:

• Do you have a stewardship policy?

• How many companies did you engage last year?

Today’s questions:

• How do you prioritise which companies to engage?

• How do you track progress and outcomes over time?

• How do you know what’s working - and what isn’t?

• How does your approach compare to peers?

• How can we independently verify your stewardship quality?

These are not compliance questions.They are confidence questions - and they increasingly determine who makes it onto shortlists.

Answering them well requires more than good intentions. It requires structure.

The evidence gap that can cost mandates

Even strong stewardship teams struggle to answer these questions consistently.

The problem is rarely expertise. It is infrastructure.

In many firms:

• Engagement activity is tracked across multiple systems and spreadsheets

• Context is lost when people move roles or leave

• Reporting becomes a reconstruction exercise under pressure

• Client questions trigger manual work rather than confident responses

As a result, stewardship is often communicated through carefully selected case studies rather than systematic evidence.

This gap has real commercial consequences. When asset owners are comparing managers who look similar on performance and philosophy, stewardship quality becomes the differentiator. But if you can't demonstrate that quality systematically, you're competing with one hand tied behind your back.

How stewardship becomes a growth engine

Forward-looking asset managers are making a deliberate shift - reframing stewardship from a reporting obligation into a strategic capability that actively wins business.

This transformation requires moving from:

Activity → Insight: Not just how many engagements, but which ones create value and why

Narrative → Evidence: Replacing selected examples with systematic proof

Internal process → External confidence: Making quality visible and verifiable to clients

When this shift happens, stewardship's commercial role transforms entirely:

1. Stewardship becomes a differentiator in competitive RFPs

When selection criteria increasingly include stewardship quality metrics, managers with documented, systematic approaches stand out. Asset owners can see - not just hear about - how you prioritise, execute, and learn from engagements.

2. Stewardship builds confidence in due diligence

Asset owners conducting rigorous reviews need more than assurances. They need evidence that withstands scrutiny. Structured stewardship intelligence provides exactly that - verifiable proof of quality that survives the toughest questions.

3. Stewardship signals organisational maturity

Systematic stewardship demonstrates long-term thinking and operational sophistication. It shows you're not just reacting to regulatory pressure - you're building genuine competitive advantage.

4. Stewardship becomes a reason to allocate capital

When asset owners must choose between managers with similar performance records, stewardship quality can tip the scale. The manager who can demonstrate stewardship effectiveness - not just claim it - wins the mandate.

At this point, stewardship stops being something that needs constant justification and starts becoming something that actively drives increased AuM.

Stewardship as the bridge when corporate reporting falls short

At the same time as investor expectations are rising, another shift is happening quietly.

Many corporates are scaling back sustainability reporting - due to regulatory uncertainty, political pressure, or changing priorities. The result is less standardised disclosure and more gaps in the information investors rely on.

This places greater weight on stewardship.

As corporate reporting becomes less reliable as a single source of truth, asset owners increasingly look to asset managers to bridge that information gap - through engagement, judgement, and evidence gathered directly from companies.

Morgan Stanley’s 2025 Sustainable Signals survey reinforces this direction, highlighting that data availability and consistency are now the top concerns for institutional investors, even as most asset owners expect allocations to sustainable strategies to continue growing.

In this environment, stewardship is no longer just about influencing companies. It becomes a credible evidence layer between corporates and capital, and managers who can provide that layer reliably have a distinct commercial advantage.

What makes stewardship quality demonstrable

As asset owners compare managers, differentiation comes down to three things:

Quality: Thoughtful, prioritised stewardship decisions based on clear rationale

Evidence: Verifiable records of objectives, progress, and outcomes over time

Seamless information flow: The ability to share stewardship intelligence confidently - internally and externally - when it matters

Managers who can deliver on all three begin to act as a true extension of their clients' operations, rather than a black box they are expected to trust.

Why engagement tracking is now foundational

As stewardship teams become leaner, how engagement is tracked matters as much as the engagement itself.

Effective engagement tracking:

• Creates a single, shared record of engagement activity and rationale

• Captures objectives, progress, and outcomes over time

• Preserves institutional memory beyond individual team members

• Reduces duplication and manual reporting

Internally, this protects quality and consistency under pressure.

Externally, it changes the nature of conversations. Instead of assembling stewardship narratives at the last minute, teams can explain decisions calmly, show follow-through, and demonstrate learning over time.

This is the difference between telling a stewardship story and showing stewardship discipline.

And in competitive situations, that difference wins mandates.

Opening stewardship to clients changes everything

One of the most meaningful consequences of structured stewardship is the ability to open information directly to clients.

When asset owners can see engagement priorities, activity, and progress in real-time - rather than receiving retrospective summaries - stewardship stops being something managers explain after the fact. It becomes something clients can understand, interrogate, and stand behind.

This transforms relationships:

• Due diligence becomes collaborative rather than defensive

• Review conversations become strategic rather than interrogatory

• Trust deepens because transparency is built into the operating model

Asset owners reward this level of transparency with continued allocations - and refer managers who operate this way to their peers.

Where the right platform makes the difference

In practice, turning stewardship into a growth engine requires infrastructure that supports the full ambition.

When teams are lean and expectations are high, stewardship cannot rely on fragmented tools or informal processes. What's needed is a platform that supports complete stewardship workflows - clearly, coherently, and without friction. This is where the Impactive platform fits naturally.

By bringing engagement planning, activity, rationale, progress, and outcomes into a single, intuitive system, Impactive creates a genuine single source of truth for stewardship. Teams no longer need to piece together information from multiple places or rely on individual memory; the logic and history of engagement lives in one place, accessible when it matters.

Crucially, the platform is designed around how stewardship teams actually work. That means comprehensive workflows without unnecessary complexity - enabling adoption without adding administrative burden or slowing teams down.

This foundation allows stewardship information to flow naturally - internally to maintain quality, and externally to build confidence and win business.

The question for asset managers is no longer whether stewardship matters. The evidence is clear - it does, and increasingly so.

The real questions are:

• Can you prove the quality of your stewardship approach to asset owners who are actively comparing you to peers?

• Can you respond confidently when tough questions come in RFPs and due diligence meetings?

• Can you open your stewardship to clients in ways that build trust and differentiate your firm?

For firms that can answer yes to these questions, stewardship transforms from a cost center that needs defending into a growth engine that actively wins and retains mandates.

Ready to build stewardship your clients can stand behind?

Impactive helps leading asset managers turn stewardship quality into competitive advantage - creating a single source of truth that builds confidence, credibility, and commercial impact.

See how Impactive turns stewardship into a mandate-winning capability.

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