Sustainability Report 2019

Big companies report their success via quarterly earnings reports. We think that you should judge a company on more than its profits. This is what we got up to that we are proud of in 2019.

2019 Results

It isn’t all about the money but at the outset of Altor we committed to donate 10% of our gross revenues to our sister charity, The Altor Foundation. This meant that our business year ending 30th April 2019 resulted in a payment of £25,000 from us to the Foundation. We expect this to at least double in 2020.

In 2019 we asked Carbon Footprint of Basingstoke to assess our Carbon Impact in 2019. Their report showed that our total carbon footprint for the year was 29.3 tonnes CO2e. Most of this was generated by transport to see our clients where they live or work and our new office in Fleet. We chose to offset these emissions by funding VCS certified global clean energy projects.

We don’t want to hide behind carbon offsetting and are also trying hard to reduce our impact. We produce 95% of our initial and annual client reporting and advice in an electronic format to save paper and ink. Through initial onboarding this saves an average of 200 A4 pages per client and 20 A4 pages per client annually thereafter. We haven’t been able to completely remove paper from our processes yet and so we use 100% recycled paper and sustainable inks. We are working with all of the platforms and investment managers that we use for clients to introduce electonic signatures and reduce paperwork wherever possible.

We don’t deliver off the shelf investment solutions for our clients and work with them to bespoke portfolios to their needs, goals and interests. Of the £150M that we are responsible for, circa £3M is screened to exclude the worst companies such as tobacco manufacturers, £15M is not only negatively screened in this way but also invests positively in companies making a positive social difference in the world. The impact of this investment can be seen in our 2019 Annual Report.

2020 Priorities

We worked with the good people at B Lab and subjected ourselves to the B Impact Assessment in 2019. We hope once this data is verified that we will achieve certified B Corporation status as a firm in 2020. The unverified results gave us a score of 122 amongst our peer group of 1269 companies. This would put us close to the median result of the ‘Best of the World Honorees’ and well in excess of the score of 80 for B Corporation qualification. We choose the B Corporation assessment as it is the most rigorous and wide ranging assessment that we could find covering; Governance, Workers, Community, Environment and Customers. Certified B Corporation status is held by some of the leaders in sustainable business globally. We will bring you more news once we get the results of our application.

We are going to start focussing on our office in 2020 to see what we can achieve in terms of reducing our environmental impact as this is 50% of our emissions. We will commnuicate progress as it is made but hope to be able to report more in our 2020 Sustainability report.