Tumelo powers pass-through voting solution for £2bn Camden Pension Fund

Bristol-based fintech for good, Tumelo, has announced its latest efforts to make the finance world a more transparent industry.

Tumelo is enabling a new pass-through voting solution being offered by Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM), making it the first UK asset manager to embrace this level of client empowerment.

The £2bn Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) for Camden is the first client to take advantage of the pass-through voting partnership, allowing it to vote directly in line with its responsible investment values including CEO remuneration and climate change. 

Tumelo has provided ‘expression of wish’ voting capabilities to LGIM and their clients since September 2020, allowing them to communicate their voting preferences.  

With ‘expression of wish’ voting, clients do not have a direct say on their proportional vote, and although fund managers may take the clients’ views into account, the fund managers’ voting may not necessarily align with their client’s preferences. This potential for misalignment is exacerbated for clients invested in the same securities across multiple investment managers’ funds, who may vote differently to each other.

Tumelo sought to innovate this structure: its pass-through solution enables pooled-fund investors to vote their shares in proportion to the value of their investment in the fund. This empowers clients to engage in voting for the first time, or continue to delegate voting activity to fund managers should they choose.

For policies, clients can bring their own, or build/select one from any proxy advisor. Once a policy is chosen, clients can always override the recommendation through an easy-to-use interface and smart notifications. Any votes clients don’t place fall back into the fund manager’s own voting allocation. 

The first client to take advantage of the LGIM and Tumelo pass-through voting solution is the £2bn Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) for Camden.

While votes in Camden’s segregated mandate are cast in line with its values via a bespoke voting policy by proxy advisor PIRC, votes attached to its pooled funds were previously cast by LGIM. The new pass-through voting solution enables Camden to apply its voting policy consistently across its entire book.

“We are proud to be among the first to use pass-through voting on pooled funds,” says Rishi Madlani, Chair of Pension Committee, Camden Pension Fund. “We can now ensure Camden has one, strong voice in the market on the most important issues for the scheme and its members, such as curbing CEO remuneration and combatting the climate crisis.”

Georgia Stewart, CEO of Tumelo, tells us, “Investors, whether retail or institutional, are becoming increasingly aware of the power they have to make a difference with the companies they invest in. At Tumelo we help amplify their voice and ensure their money is working the way they want it to.

“Particularly for institutional investors like pension funds, stewardship is absolutely vital and our technology helps them exercise the pooled voting power they have to make a real difference on behalf of their members.”