Corporate Responsibility
At CAM, we are committed to acting responsibly across all parts of our business. See more information below on how we focus on four key areas: Community, Environment, Sustainability and Stewardship.
Community
Giving back to the community is central to everyone at CAM; we actively look to help in areas that have touched our staff on a personal level.
All staff have the opportunity throughout the year to support charities that are important to them, including nominating ideas for the money that we pledge at Christmas in lieu of traditional Christmas cards and identifying who benefits from our annual donations to charities. We also look for the opportunity to creates new alliances, such as upon the recent launch of our annual client survey initiative when £5 for each survey completed will be donated to 2 charities chosen by the younger members of the CAM team. Raise Your Hands works with charities that support young people, such as Football Beyond Borders and the Wave Project. The HASAG helps those whose lives have been impacted by asbestos related disease, helping them to access the information and support that they need.
Cancer has touched the life of many of our staff, their families and our clients. In recognition of this deep personal interest, we have an ongoing commitment to work with Macmillan Cancer Support. This includes our annual bake-off event, which is hotly contested each year and results in some delicious sweet and savoury treats! We have also recently supported a team of intrepid rowers who crossed the Atlantic to raise funds for a charity that supports young female victims of cancer, a situation that has particularly affected all at CAM. We did manage to find some levity from the sponsorship that we provided; graphic tales of Christmas day on a boat made for hilarious anecdotes to share at a client drinks party.
Some of our staff are active volunteers with charities and spend time outside of the office in working to support their needs This includes volunteering at a homeless shelter, providing support to a church and, again, working with a cancer charity. To this end, we recently decided to offer all staff 2 paid days a year where they can participate in charitable activities. We look forward to sharing their experiences with you.
Environment
We meet regularly within CAM to actively seek ways in which our day-to-day activities can become more sustainable. Whether it’s using the recycling bins, continuing our commitment to move to a paperless approach to serving our clients or introducing motion sensitive office lighting, we are educating everyone at CAM to become more environmentally friendly. Do work with us on this; we’ve made great progress in reducing the paperwork that we send out and reducing our carbon footprint with the introduction of flexible working from home for all staff but we know that there is still more that we can do so please share any ideas that you might have.
Sustainable Investing
Since the launch of our designated Sustainable service, we now provide a special offering for those clients who want to reflect ESG issues in their investment activities. This builds on the research and investment foundations that we employ for our ‘real return’ portfolios. We believe that our traditional portfolios will continue the same approach of seeking the best outcomes for clients within their desired risk profile and return benchmarks without a sustainable investment filtering. However, whilst we are not aiming to give every portfolio holding a sustainable badge, we are already assessing each fund we review as to how ‘ESG friendly’ its credentials are; an easier question to answer for a sustainable forestry fund than for an ETF.
Ongoing regulation and government legislation will shape the future of the industry. We look forward to continuing to develop our approach to sustainable investing in years to come.
UK Stewardship Code
The Financial Reporting Council (‘FRC’) is an independent regulator who oversees financial reporting, accounting and auditing and sets the UK Corporate Governance and Stewardship Codes. The Stewardship Code provides the benchmark for institutional investors to meet ownership obligations in respect of UK companies. Here at CAM, we are required to either comply with the Code or explain why we do not.
We primarily look after the wealth of private clients and not institutional investors. As much of the Code is not aimed at this type of business, on this basis we have elected not to comply with the UK Stewardship Code with respect to reporting.
However, we do support good stewardship and, for those smaller companies where we hold direct equity exposure, we actively engage with the company’s management and will vote on issues that are important.