Awards Entry Form:

Best Ethical Investor 2024

Entries have now closed

This award will go to the investment fund provider that can best demonstrate effective responsible or ethical investment outcomes. Entrants will demonstrate leading practice in avoiding harm from their investments, generating or supporting positive impact, providing strong corporate governance and stewardship, and operating with ethical conduct.

This category is open to retail managed investment fund providers, wholesale funds, private equity funds or venture capital funds that can best demonstrate effective responsible or ethical investment practices. The provider must have a substantial presence in New Zealand including employees. Please note that this is a separate category to the Best Ethical KiwiSaver provider award.

In situations where the provider has different levels of investment for positive impact across different funds, those differences should be clearly stated.

An administration fee of $150 + GST is charged for each award entry. An invoice will be sent to the contact details submitted with the award entry.

Please contact awards@mindfulmoney.nz if you have any queries about the awards process.

This is an online form, and you cannot save it, so you may want to answer each section offline and copy it across.

Download questions

Fund Provider Name or Business Name

Website address

Main contact for this award

Email address

Position in organisation

Phone number

Award entry submission

Please keep your total number of words to 2500. The judges may ignore any wording over this limit.

Avoiding harm

Describe how your fund(s) avoids investments in companies that do harm to the environment and/or society for issues important to the New Zealand public (see Mindful Money’s methodology), including: - Policies to avoid investing in companies that do harm, including clear definitions of exclusion criteria, materiality and thresholds for divestment - The proportion of investments across your portfolios that are under ethical investment management and for managed funds, how ethical investment policies are applied to external funds with pooled mandates - For managed retail funds, the rationale for holding companies of concern that are listed under your portfolios on Mindful Money’s Fund Checker. Judges will be provided with the latest portfolio analysis from the Mindful Money website (30 September 2023 data). - For other funds, include a listing of investments (ideally to 31 March 2024) and, where available, a description of their business (this may be provided through a link to a website or report).

Investment for Positive Impact

Describe the extent to which your investment fund portfolios include investments in equity or bonds of companies that create positive social and/or environmental benefits: - Strategy: A short statement describing your strategy on investments in positive impact, including target returns and criteria for investment. - Scope of Impact: % of portfolio in positive impact investments, in sectors (eg. renewable energy) or SDGs or other categories - Scale of positive impact: A list of the top 3 investments in positive impact, with an explanation about the company and the scale of its impact in relation to the company (this can be a link to an impact or sustainability report). - Extent of Contribution: For those 3 companies, whether they are listed or unlisted, and the contribution from your investment (eg. assistance with capital raising, substantial management support, or finance only). - Plans: Your plans for further positive impact investing (eg. target level as % portfolio).

Stewardship and Contribution to the company

In some cases, the policies and practices of stewardship will be the same for the full range of funds for each investment provider. However, where these differ across funds or asset classes, please clearly state the differences. - Outline your policy on engagement, including thresholds for when to undertake engagement, escalation criteria and when to divest from the company and whether a signatory of NZ Stewardship Code - For investors in listed companies, outline public disclosure of voting record on ESG issues (include URL), and supporting information: > policy and/or guidelines for voting on ESG issues > proportion of votes for and against management on ESG issues > proportion of listed equities in the portfolio voted by value - For investors in private markets, please describe the information on ESG that is shared with investors or the public. - Describe engagement activity beyond voting (include URL, if any), and supporting information: > your approach, including the coverage of companies and the depth of engagement (eg. those you engage with occasionally versus those with deep and sustained engagement) > whether direct third party or collaborative engagement > contributions that you make to the success of companies in your portfolio, including governance, capital raising or management support. -Provide outcomes of engagement (include URL if relevant) where engagement has contributed to a company agreeing to an identified change or where there was a significant contribution to the success of the company

Ethical Conduct and Better Member Outcomes

1. Provide a short description of the provider including: - membership growth over the past three years to 31 March 2024 - returns after fees over the past three years to 31 March 2024 - investment strategy (this may be a link to a URL). 2. Describe how you communicate with your members and the public about ethical investment 3. Describe your climate policies and practices, including: - Your climate policy and approach to reducing emissions - Targets or commitments to reduce your operational emissions and the financed emissions in your funds, including specific actions and progress - Your disclosure of climate policies and emissions, including URL 4. Describe policies and practices which improve social and environmental outcomes in Aotearoa, including: - Initiatives to lift the financial literacy of members or the general public - Measures to support diversity, equity and inclusion in your workplace and/or the sector - Strategy and % revenues for charity partnerships, donations and other forms of community support

Supporting documentation

Please include URL links to any supporting documentation for your entry, such as links to articles and other content referenced in the entry. We strongly encourage you to use URLs for your supporting documentation, however if you need to email any to us please send them to awards@mindfulmoney.nz.

Declaration

All information provided to Mindful Money through the 2024 Mindful Money Awards Entry Form is true and correct to the best of my knowledge.

The above declaration is true.

Yes

Terms & Conditions of Entry

- An administration fee of $150 + GST per award entry is charged. An invoice will be sent to the contact details submitted with the award entry and must be paid by 31st May 2024. - You may nominate your own business, or others. You do not have to be nominated in order to enter the awards. - All entrants must provide true and accurate information and disclose any liabilities such as business and/or tax related and/or current pending litigation, which could compromise the judges’ analysis of the business, and/or adversely affect the integrity and reputation of the Mindful Money Awards. - Mindful Money will not accept responsibility for errors or omissions reproduced in award publicity material, or for work lost or damaged. Entrants should not make contact with the judges in order to lobby or promote their entry. - Judging will be based on the evidence provided in the initial entry. Judges are required to declare any conflicts of interest. - Judges and Mindful Money staff sign a confidentiality agreement requiring that the information submitted will not be used for any other purpose than the judging process. - Once shortlisted within a category, supplementary information may be required. - Finalists and winners agree to being involved in publicity related to the awards, including photo and other media opportunities with sponsors, judges and Mindful Money staff. - A representative of category finalists must be available to attend the Awards ceremony at the Maritime Room in Auckland CBD on 14th June in person. -Mindful Money reserves the right and shall be permitted at all times to use at their discretion any material submitted for the Awards, on the Mindful Money website and in promotional and educational material for the purposes of generating awareness and publicity about the annual awards events.

I have read the Terms & Conditions of Entry and agree to comply with them.

Yes

Interested in becoming a sponsor and supporting the ethical investment movement?

Contact awards@mindfulmoney.nz