We take the time to regularly listen to our stakeholders to ensure that our sustainability approach continues to focus on the right things. In 2014, we carried out a review of our main sustainability priorities, talking to many different internal and external stakeholder groups about what’s important to them. These stakeholders included our customers, our people, shareholders, industry analysts, regulators and the media.
We grouped the feedback into themes and ranked these themes in the order of what our stakeholders found most important. We then assessed this against our business objectives to help us understand the most important sustainability issues for us. Through this review, we found that our five areas of focus remain material to our business, and continue to give us a clear picture of what’s important to our stakeholders:
• Our customers and clients • Operating responsibly • Our community • Our people • Our environment.
The review also helped us gain a deeper understanding of the priorities within these areas and this has shaped our work in 2014. More information about this review is included in our full sustainability report.
All of our sustainability work in 2014 was overseen by our Board’s Corporate Responsibility Committee. To strengthen the focus we have on sustainability at Board level, we now intend to make it a key part of our plc Board agenda, with time dedicated to discussions on the topic and regular reporting. Because of this stronger sustainability focus for the plc Board, we plan to no longer have this separate committee to deal with corporate responsibility matters.
1. Our customers and clients
Being a sustainable business means offering products and services built around our customers’ and clients’ needs. We aim to do this by putting customers at the centre of our decision making, with pricing that is fair and transparent, while building meaningful relationships for the long term.
Getting closer to our customers and clients
Across our Group we look to capture rich insight that can inform how we develop products and services, so we can help customers and clients realise their financial ambitions. This includes things such as who our customers feel they’re responsible for, what they worry about, and what the important things are in their lives. The insight helps us understand more about the behaviour of our customers in the different countries we operate in, and can develop our services to be more relevant and engaging.
Insight and innovation to support clients worldwide
In 2014, Standard Life Investments’ annual client survey provided insight from around 750 clients globally on how they feel about the services we provide. We also use studies by academics and research institutions we have established relationships with. The insight we gather helps us make sure we have the right products and capabilities to meet our clients’ diverse needs – at the same time as supporting our global growth ambitions. By the end of 2014, this kind of insight had played a big part in Standard Life Investments launching 14 new products and opening new international offices – helping to serve clients in 41 countries across five continents. Standard Life Investments now operates out of 17 countries worldwide, and we plan to open more offices in 2015.
Creating a meaningful customer experience
The rich insight we gather helps us to make improvements to our service – particularly what we provide online. We saw a number of examples of improvements during 2014:
• We completely redeveloped our UK retail website – www.standardlife.co.uk – with each stage of development based on customer feedback
• Customers can access some of our services via apps on mobile devices – and we launched new apps to help customers in Hong Kong manage their money on the go
Supporting business to help people save for their future
To help make it easier for companies to set up pension schemes for their employees, we’ve been working to make sure we can keep up with demand more quickly and efficiently. Our Good to Go proposition, for example, aims to help take the burden from smaller companies by letting them set up fully compliant workplace pension schemes online in just six minutes. Our work on Good to Go led to us winning Auto Enrolment Innovation of the Year at the 2014 UK Pensions Awards, for the second year in a row. Read more about the other awards we have won in Section 1.4 – Business segment performance.
Innovation and transparency in pricing
From the feedback our stakeholders give us, an important area for our Group to focus on is making sure that we are transparent about our approach to pricing. We believe that this is an area where we can still do better, and we continue to work towards innovating and improving. We also look to build relationships with regulators in the places where we operate, working together to build a more prosperous world for our customers.
In April 2014, our Wrap platform became the UK’s first fully unbundled major adviser platform for both existing and new business. This means that all new platform business is done using clean (or unbundled) funds – where no commission or cash rebates are paid to fund groups or advisers, and charges are clearly disclosed. It’s also helped drive down the cost of investing. By doing this now, we are two years early in meeting the new platform regulations that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has put in place. Our aim in working to this early deadline has been to help IFAs so they can get on with running successful, sustainable and profitable advice businesses.
Building relationships with our customers
We launched a new programme in 2014 to pull together the data we hold on our UK and Ireland customers into a single, complete picture. This has helped us improve our data quality, governance and analytic capability to ensure we can talk to customers at the right time, and about the right things. Consequently, our communication capability has shifted significantly, with access to our customers by email increasing from 4% in 2013 to 30% in 2014. This resulted in an increase in the number of communications we have with our customers on topics that matter to them.
We believe we can strengthen our customer relationships by supporting positive change in our industry. One way we have done this recently is by sharing our knowledge on pension legislation. In September 2014, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the immediate scrapping of a 55% tax on inherited pensions – something that we had been actively lobbying for. We sent letters and emails with details of the changes to customers who were still within the period of time that they could choose to cancel the product they’d applied for with us. We wanted to help them make sure they had all the information they needed to make a decision that was right for them.
Our relationships with our customers extend to more than simply helping with financial matters. In Ireland we launched The New You, a guide to help customers approaching retirement plan for the next phase of their lives. It includes hints and tips on staying healthy, happy and financing life after retirement.
2. Operating responsibly
Risks and opportunities
To run our business responsibly we need to stay alert to opportunities to grow our business sustainably, and to improve the outlook for our customers and shareholders. When Standard Life Investments acquired Ignis Asset Management in 2014, it provided an opportunity to improve the value we offer our customers and shareholders, and our capabilities for managing their assets. The sale of our Canadian business to Manulife has also further strengthened the value we provide for shareholders.
Recent developments in the regulatory landscape in the United Arab Emirates, and the resulting business environment, have impacted our business in Dubai. As a result, we feel that we can no longer offer our customers or shareholders long-term sustainable value in this region. We therefore announced the closure of this business in November 2014.
You can read more about each of these in Section 1.4 – Business segment performance.
Running a business responsibly also means staying alert to risks that could lie ahead in our markets, and what this could mean for everyone involved. An example of this was our monitoring of the constitutional debate around the Scottish independence
referendum. Our main consideration was the interests of our customers, clients and shareholders, and whether these and the sustainability of our business would be put at risk by constitutional change. We made it clear that if we felt this would be the case, we would do whatever we considered necessary to protect their interests and our competitive position.
To help grow our business in a sustainable way, it’s important that we continually consider our overall competitiveness, which includes the prices we offer our customers and our operating costs. One area of focus in 2014 was making sure that the rewards and benefits we offer our people remain competitive and consistent. We proposed changes to the way we will provide employee pensions, one of our biggest costs – so that we can offer an attractive but more sustainable way of helping our people achieve their retirement ambitions. We understand that this could mean big changes for many of our people. As a result, we’ve worked to provide our people with all the information they need to understand what the changes would mean for them, and to answer the questions they have.
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1.6 Our sustainable business overview continued
Our influence and leadership
Wherever we operate around the world, we believe we have an important role to play in using our influence to encourage positive change in society. For our customers, it’s about giving them the means to fulfil their ambitions through a positive financial future. We’ve seen some great examples of how we can give them the support they need in an engaging way, such as online:
• Our portal for UK customers, offers expert perspectives and articles on saving for the future – and we’ve used its MoneyPlus blog, for example, to educate customers about the new rules on taking flexible pension withdrawals instead of annuities • Our Head of Customer Affairs became a guest author for external publications in the UK, offering tips for new parents on family
finance
• Through blogs and educational events we supported Good Money Week, a national campaign to raise awareness of sustainable, responsible and ethical finance.
With our own people, we’ve used our expertise to make sure that they have the knowledge and confidence to take control of their financial future. We offer products and services at preferential prices for employees and their families, including pensions, savings, and investments and protection products. We’ve also offered information sessions to educate our people on other important elements of planning for their future.
To help shape public policy in a way that benefits our customers and contributes to wider society’s progress, we’ve kept up a programme of public affairs and policy engagement. We initiate meetings and events with policy makers and wider opinion formers on long-term savings and investments issues, and we have a presence at the major UK party conferences to make our views on this known.
We believe we have a responsibility to help the communities around us too. We’ve continued to play a leading role in our industry around our approach to employability, particularly in creating opportunities for young people. There’s more on this in the Our community section below.
We also believe this responsibility extends to our suppliers and the companies we invest in, and encouraging good business practice among them. We feel it’s important that we use a diverse range of suppliers across our Group, and that we share our knowledge to help them be more sustainable in how they do business. We ran four events in 2014 focused on making our business more accessible for small-to-medium enterprises and sharing sustainability best practice, and the feedback we’ve received has been very positive.
We keep up active engagement with the companies in which we are, or may become, a shareholder in. Through the responsible investment team at Standard Life Investments, we carry out research and analysis on how investee companies address their environmental, social and governance issues, which lets us identify any risks or opportunities we want to discuss with them. We follow this process with investee companies across the world, and we use guidelines such as the United Nations (UN) Global Compact to inform how we evaluate the approaches that they take. This includes reviewing and encouraging best practice in areas such as the environment, employee relations, human rights and business ethics. In 2014, in collaboration with almost 350
investors, we lent our support to a statement calling on governments worldwide to provide more economically meaningful charges for carbon emissions. The statement was released ahead of the UN Climate Summit, convened by the UN Secretary-General.
3. Our community
Our focus on employability
Employability remains the main focus for how we contribute to the communities in which we operate across the world – and a strong presence in each of our sustainability themes. For us it’s about helping to improve the opportunities that people, particularly young people, are afforded in society. It’s our responsibility as a large employer to maintain a diverse, sustainable workforce and help the people in the communities around us make real progress.
We continued and expanded our work to offer young people opportunities to begin their working or academic lives. Across Standard Life Investments, we placed eight young people in a programme that offers a 12-month paid internship. We’ve also maintained our support of Edinburgh City Council’s Edinburgh Guarantee programme, offering 39 young people paid work experience for six months across our Edinburgh offices during 2014. With support from The Prince's Trust, we've been piloting a similar programme across the UK, offering a further two placements in our London offices and one in our Glasgow office. We placed three young people through our 12 month paid modern apprenticeship scheme, giving them a broad insight into our IT operations. We also supported Leonard Cheshire Disability’s Change 100 scheme, giving a paid internship to a graduate with a disability. Each of these initiatives has improved the number of employees we have in the UK who are under the age of 25 – from 0.5% of our employees in 2010 to 5.4% in 2014 – helping us to also widen the diversity and perspectives we have among our people.
We’ve also been supporting charitable initiatives that link schools and colleges with employers to help prepare young people for working life. Our support has involved offering a number of school pupils mentoring opportunities with some of our senior people. Our employability focus includes giving people a start in their careers outside of our company as well. Our involvement with The Prince’s Trust has extended to the Standard Life Charitable Trust supporting a programme in London, helping young people into jobs with small-to-medium sized businesses. It allowed 27 young people to take part in placements across 27 businesses during 2014. They are all given 12-month contracts and the Standard Life Charitable Trust funds the first six months of each placement.
Supporting the Living Wage
Since 2012 it’s been a principle of ours to pay at least a Living Wage to all of our people, including the young people on
placements with us. In 2014 we furthered this commitment by formally becoming accredited as a UK Living Wage employer. We hope that this commitment will give more people, particularly young people, the ability to save and have a future they can look forward to. It reflects our belief that, by having employment that pays enough and allows people to save for the future, we can make a big contribution to building a more prosperous society.
We also supported Living Wage Week, a UK-wide initiative to raise awareness of the topic. For us this involved hosting a breakfast for business leaders, politicians and charities to raise awareness and promote thought leadership in this area. Our work to support the Living Wage resulted in us being shortlisted for the Living Wage Champion award, which recognises the contributions of accredited employers to communities and industries by implementing and celebrating the Living Wage.
Charities and fundraising
Several charities are benefiting from our employability work, and our people take part in a vote to tell us which charities we should support. For the charity partners we chose for 2014-2015, we kept our focus on helping people achieve their potential and on improving prospects in our communities. In 2014, our people raised £156,080 for our charity partners (continuing operations only). We offer our people lots of encouragement to get involved in supporting good causes. In 2014 we launched our new Raise and Match initiative across our Group, which offers our people additional support in raising money for causes that are important to them. It means that when an employee raises money for charity, we match their fundraising up to the value of £250 a year.
4. Our people
Career and talent development
It’s our responsibility to listen and respond to our people, their aspirations and development needs, and make clear how their role fits with the wider contribution we make to society’s progress.It’s also important that all of our people have goals that continually motivate and challenge them to improve. This year we introduced our career partnership, which is a clearly defined agreement between the company and our people: we support our people in achieving their development goals and aspirations and we ask them to take responsibility for their career.
We continue to invest in talent programmes as part of our Group Development Framework, and we ensure that our senior leadership group have meaningful and stretching development goals. This year we have had a particular focus on external board appointment or directorships as a great way to gain experience and help talented senior leaders become ‘board ready’ for their career. We’ve also expanded our programme of individual coaching and mentoring for women in our leadership and talent pipeline.