Editor's Thoughts.

I was listening to today’s episode of Industry Insights with Ashley Daswa from Sanlam Corporate – one of the media sponsors of the PRI-commissioned Responsible Investment in South Africa report. And the phrase “asset owners” was used. It’s accepted that asset owners are trustees of retirement funds. And asset managers are the service providers actually doing the investing.

It stopped me in my tracks.

Are the fund members not the asset owners? If we regard pension fund savings as deferred pay, then surely the assets in those funds belong to the members? It might just be semantics to you, but language and labels are important. In my (always humble) opinion, fund members are asset owners and trustees are stewards, with a heavy and onerous fiduciary duties, who rely on asset/EB experts as guides (let’s use the word influencers).  

Now there’s a different POV. Because I (the asset owner) keep asking my asset stewards to let me know what they’re deliberately doing on ESG investing with my assets. I then receive a (very thick) service provider’s stewardship report through the influencers. Really? That quite frankly cannot be right. Sounds like everyone needs to up their game when it comes to my assets.

Revolution starts tomorrow at dawn, folks.

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