The majority of asset managers continue to overlook key social issues as part of their wider responsible investment strategies, potentially damaging portfolio performance, according to the LGT Capital Partners ESG Report 2026.
Gill Wadsworth quotes Tycho Sneyers, Managing Partner at LGT Capital Partners and member of the PRI Board, who says: “A decade of climate-related investor pressure has made it almost mandatory for managers to include climate in their ESG policies. This is the path of least resistance with standardised frameworks, widely accepted metrics such as GHG emissions and clear regulatory expectations.”
However, Sneyers says that human rights inclusion was “a very different matter”, noting the absence of equivalent regulatory impetus to force asset managers’ hands.
2025 research from MSCI reported that failure to consider human rights risk could come with a hefty price tag for portfolio performance.
Our In My Opinion this week comes from Josef Sommeregger, Global Head of Insurance, Clearwater Analytics, who writes that last month’s decision by the US treasury to double planned buybacks of some longer dated government bonds offered a stark reminder that even the world’s deepest and most liquid debt market cannot take anything for granted.
Sommeregger writes: “The significance extends beyond the additional purchases themselves. Treasury buybacks, designed to support liquidity by purchasing older and less actively traded securities from the market, does not mean that treasuries exist in isolation. The same securities sit at the heart of repo markets, not to mention trade against treasury futures. Changes in one part of the US financial system can therefore ripple swiftly through others.”
Voting is now open for this year’s Institutional Asset Manager Service Provider awards. Simply vote for your favourite service provider operating in the institutional asset manager space in our questionnaire. Follow this link.
The report and winners for last year’s outing can be found here.
Beverly Chandler, Managing Editor, Institutional Asset Manager
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