Project Ongoing

NZAOA Stewardship Guidelines Evaluation

Evaluating the top 100 asset managers against the NZAOA guidelines

A systematic, academically independent assessment of how the 100 largest asset managers meet the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance stewardship guidelines, scored from public disclosures so asset owners can benchmark managers directly.

Stewardship
Net Zero
Benchmarking
Collaborators:
Logo of Allianz Investment ManagementLogo of Wespath

The challenge

Asset owners have no standardised, comparable way to score how well their managers meet the NZAOA stewardship guidelines.

Every asset owner repeats the same analysis - slow, inconsistent, and hard to compare - so leaders and laggards are difficult to identify and progress is impossible to track over time. SDGLabs publishes a single, transparent, academically independent assessment so asset owners can benchmark managers directly and integrate the results into selection, appointment, and monitoring.

Preliminary results

We present two views of the same assessment: the mean stewardship score by region, and the ranked overall score for every assessed manager.

Proxy VotingEngagementClimate Policy Overall
2.02.22.42.62.82.46Globalall 1002.60GBn = 422.55EUn = 332.40USn = 132.52JPn = 202.52APACn = 22
Figure 1. Mean stewardship score by region (0-4), across all 100 assessed managers globally and by regional entity. The Overall diamond marks each region's average; the dots break it down by guideline area.
SDGLabs analysis. Preliminary results.
BB-C+CC-D+DD-E
01234median 2.48mean 2.35AM 1 (highest)AM 100 (lowest)Ranked managers (0–4 scale)
Figure 2. Overall score for every assessed manager, ranked highest to lowest and shown anonymously (AM 1-100), coloured by letter grade. The dashed line marks the cross-manager mean and the solid line the median.
SDGLabs analysis. Preliminary results.

How the assessment works

We assess the 100 largest public-equity asset managers - globally and by regional entity (GB, EU, US, JP, APAC) - using only public-domain disclosures. Each manager is scored against 62 sub-questions aligned to the NZAOA baseline, plus 5 SDGLabs questions focused on evidence of competitiveness. Our financial data-science and AI system extracts the relevant passages from every public document and scores each sub-question 0-4 against a fixed rubric, with human review at each step.

Get involved

We actively encourage asset owners and asset managers to work with us on the NZAOA assessment.

Asset owners

Submit new questions for us to evaluate, so the assessment reflects the stewardship issues that matter most to you.

Submit a question

Asset managers

Review the public sources behind your assessment and discuss which additional sources you may intend to publish on your own domain.

Discuss your score

Or email us directly at nzaoa@sdglabs.ai.

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NZAOA stewardship guidelines evaluation — mean stewardship score by region
Project: NZAOA Stewardship Guidelines Evaluation
Scoring the 100 largest asset managers against the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance stewardship guidelines.
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