UK- Standard Life Investments is to build in activism and corporate governance aspects to its total investment process, prompted, it says by changes in the attitudes of institutional investors.

Speaking at the National Association of Pension Funds’ Annual Investment Conference in Edinburgh, Guy Jubb, head of corporate governance at Standard Life, said: “Pension fund deficits have sharpened attitudes to activism.”

As a result, he claimed that mandates were ‘shifting away’ from balanced to specialist and that global capital flows had prompted governance experts to look beyond national boundaries.

The trend, he said, had exposed European economies where shareholders had been ‘inactive’ often leading to ‘abysmal’ returns.
This, he added, was because nobody in the governance chain was “actively seeking improvements”.

“Only by demonstrating that we have the capability to take an active stance on a global basis will we be able to win specialist investment mandates. The trend towards specialist mandates makes this a win-win proposition” he claimed.

Standard Life Investments said in a statement that assets under management
amounted to 86.5 billion pounds (128.4 billion euro) at the end of last year