Asset Owner 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 only so asset owners can benchmark managers directly based on the information which their service providers are willing to be accountable for towards all their clients.
[Disclaimer: Please note that this Project is neither commissioned nor executed by the NZAOA itself. While our scientists at SDGLabs.ai have chosen to follow the NZAOA's call and operate in reasonably close communication with NZAOA members, its secretariat and asset owners beyond NZAOA, the project is executed independently in our academic setting. This means, inter alia, that our focus is on accuracy and technology advancements instead of time or servicing stakeholders. In other words, while we answer all emails directed to us, we have no 'client service' team or equivalent and hence responses may take some time.]
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.
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 guidance based stewardship assessment.
Asset owners
Submit new questions for us to evaluate, so the assessment reflects the stewardship issues that matter most to you.
Submit a questionAsset managers
Review the public sources behind your assessment and discuss which additional sources you may intend to publish on your own domain.
Discuss your scoreOr email us directly at nzaoa@sdglabs.ai.
