The Asset Owner Diversity Charter (AODC) is building a data platform that the asset owner-led initiative believes will better fuel its mission to increase diversity across the investment industry.
Launched several years ago, the AODC brings together asset owners, asset managers, consultants, academics, and other stakeholders. Signatories commit to incorporating diversity into manager selection and ongoing manager monitoring, and to collaborating across the industry on best practices.
Announced at the AODC’s annual conference last month, the initiative’s new data platform will be built and powered by Orbit Financial Technology, an AI-powered investment research platform.
With the platform, AODC signatories and asset managers will have a single, structured, auditable infrastructure covering the full lifecycle of the AODC process, from the design of the AODC questionnaire to benchmarking and reporting.
For the moment, the process is Excel-based and hasn’t really supported comparisons between asset managers or over time, while also requiring asset owners to deal with data problems on an individual basis.
“This new platform removes a lot of frictions,” said Chris van der Merwe, responsible investment manager at Brunel Pension Partnership and a member of the AODC steering committee.
“For asset managers this will be beneficial because they will only have to submit once, while asset owners will be able to do better benchmarking,” he told IPE. “We’ll be able to give more asset owner-specific views on diversity and gain more actionable insights.”
Helen Price, co-chair of the AODC steering committee, said Orbit’s platform will give signatories and participating managers “the tools to report, benchmark, and act on diversity data with a level of rigour the industry has not had before”.
The aim is for the platform to be launched in January 2027. The appointment of Orbit is funded by contributions from AODC asset owner steering committee members. The previous approach involved two providers giving their time free of charge.
“AODC is setting the standard for transparency and accountability on diversity across the investment industry, and we are proud to put our platform to work behind it,” said Da Wei, chief executive officer of Orbit.
The AODC operates under the Diversity Project, which recently rebranded as Inclusion in Finance.
