Active ownership for real world outcomes

Active ownership is an integral part of our investment process at Invesco. We view engagement as an opportunity to encourage continuous improvement on ESG issues. To make the most of limited time with management teams, we prioritize ESG risk factors and key issue relevance per internal and external resources. We also take advantage of Invesco’s scale, which increases the chance of meaningful engagement. We can draw on this collective power to capture management’s attention and use our influence to encourage stronger ESG-related behavior from the firms and entities in which we invest. Overall, our highly active approach of engaging management teams on the importance of ESG helps us achieve our clients’ dual objectives of maximizing return on capital and delivering on ESG principles.

When casting votes, we incorporate several factors and inputs to inform the voting process, including company disclosures, internal and external research, proxy voting advisory services, the unique circumstances affecting companies, regional best practices, and any dialogue we have had with company management. The voting decision lies with our portfolio managers and analysts, with input and support from our Global ESG team and Proxy Operations functions.

Invesco’s Policy Statement on Global Corporate Governance and Proxy Voting (Global Proxy Policy) describes policies and procedures designed to ensure that we vote proxies in the best interests of our clients. It also aims to help clients understand our commitment to responsible investing and proxy voting, as well as the good governance principles that inform our approach to engagement and voting at shareholder meetings.

Our proprietary proxy voting platform ‘PROXYintel’ facilitates implementation of voting decisions and rationales across global investment teams. In cases where individual portfolio managers choose to vote a particular resolution in a way that is not aligned with our good governance principles and internal voting guidelines, our policy seeks to ensure rationales are fully documented. Split votes may occur where views on a particular proposal differ between portfolio management teams based on the objectives or interests of any individual fund.