We believe that acting responsibly and sustainably will help IFGL build a better business whilst having a lasting and positive impact on our staff, our policyholders and the environment.
And so we’re committed to progressing our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals:
Environmental: measuring and reducing our impact on the environment, with a view to becoming carbon-neutral and achieving net-zero emissions
Social: aiming to have a positive social impact in the communities in which we operate by promoting diversity, fairness and responsible business conduct
Governance: ensuring we have appropriate governance and decision-making structures in place to mitigate risk and having a positive impact in the locations we operate in
We believe that working towards achieving this is the right thing to do, and aligns our goals and values with those of our staff, our policyholders/financial advisers and the communities we are based in.
Examples of our ESG considerations are shown in the table below:
We have created an ESG Committee to drive forward our ESG initiatives and ensure we continually achieve and improve upon our ESG Commitments. This Committee provides quarterly reports on our ESG performance to the IFGL Board.
In 2021 we carried out a full assessment of IFGL’s Carbon footprint, to provide a baseline to measure progress.
We discovered that, given we employ more than 550 people, in relative terms we have a low footprint starting point. However, we are keen to reduce our footprint further, and where we cannot reduce it we are making plans to offset it.
To help reduce our Carbon Footprint we have introduced the following initiatives in our Isle of Man offices during 2022:
We have created a scorecard to track our progress in delivering our ESG strategy. We report on progress on each metric to our Board each quarter. The scorecard is a mix of monitoring initiatives we have already started, and identifying new ESG enterprises. Our 2023 goals are as follows:
Our clients’ desire to invest in more socially responsible funds is growing. Our clients increasingly want to invest in ways that reflect their view of the world (without sacrificing returns).
We have therefore made it easy for our customers to follow their hearts and their heads when selecting how their money is invested.
We offer a large and growing range of thematic ESG funds in our RL360 and Friends Provident International defined fund ranges for those who want to invest in ESG specific funds. We’ve also teamed up with Morningstar to apply the Morningstar Sustainability Rating to every fund we offer, so clients can see exactly how ESG-friendly each investment choice is.