Why stewardship needs a system upgrade
Mais Callan, co-founder and CEO of Impactive Tech, argues that it is high time to upgrade stewardship's infrastructure to unlock its full potential
Engagement on governance and sustainability issues has become a cornerstone of responsible investment. Investors now regularly challenge companies on everything from climate risk and human rights to board composition and pay structures. The intent is clear and commendable. The execution, however, is falling short.
Despite billions of dollars in funds that say they are aligned with sustainability and long-term investment horizons and thousands of companies fielding investor queries, engagement remains fragmented, duplicative, and difficult to measure in terms of real-world outcomes. For many, stewardship is a process powered by good intentions but hampered by outdated tools and siloed information.
It’s time to ask a key question: If we could rebuild stewardship from the ground up today, would it look like this?
Legacy thinking in a new era
In the world of enterprise technology, legacy systems are periodically retired in favour of more adaptive, connected, and efficient frameworks. Stewardship, too, may be overdue for this kind of thoughtful re-evaluation. This isn’t about digitising the status quo – it’s about rethinking the very architecture that underpins engagement.
At present, too many responsible investment initiatives pursue similar goals independently, unintentionally diluting their collective influence. The aims – long-term value creation, risk reduction, systemic change – are valid. But the workflow is broken.
According to Impactive Tech’s AI-powered stewardship intelligence tool, in just one year of stewardship reports, investors cited over 1,400 separate and overlapping initiatives, coalitions, working groups, taskforces, or standards they’re involved in. These affiliations may reflect commitment – but they also point to a splintered system with no shared map of who’s doing what, with whom, or to what end.
A better-designed system would coordinate more, duplicate less, and deploy engagement efforts more strategically – making them more cohesive, less fragmented, and more likely to be addressed.
A system under strain
The pressure is mounting. In 2024, a Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) report found nearly half of investment firms felt under-resourced for effective engagement – even as their obligations expand. With over 5,000 PRI signatories representing more than $120trn in assets, companies can receive hundreds of similar requests each year – while investors have no clear line of sight into what’s already been asked, answered, or resolved.
This can lead to redundant efforts, missed signals, and overburdened corporate IR and sustainability teams. No one knows whether we’re moving the needle – or just spinning it. This isn’t just frustrating. It’s inefficient, costly, and ultimately unsustainable. It risks bringing the whole activity into disrepute.
From craft to scale
Stewardship is often bespoke, labour-intensive, and dependent on goodwill and institutional memory. While this approach may have sufficed in the past, the magnitude and urgency of today’s challenges – climate change, inequality, and governance failures – call for nothing less than an industrial-strength response. To meet these challenges, stewardship must become more structured and scalable – without losing the credibility and care that give it value. We need systems that can handle the complexity, align stakeholders, and generate decision-useful intelligence.
Five questions that shouldn’t be hard to answer
For engagement to be truly effective, investors need more than conviction – they need context.
That starts with being able to answer five basic, but critical, questions:
1. Who else has engaged this company on this issue?
2. Has the company responded or made a public commitment?
3. What additional value can our engagement bring?
4. Is there a collaborative effort we can join, rather than acting alone?
5. What’s the company’s track record on responsiveness?
These aren’t abstract ideas – they are practical prerequisites. And yet, few investors can consistently answer them, because the relevant information is scattered across voting records, PDF reports, press releases, forums, and spreadsheets. The industry is drowning in unstructured data and starving for synthesis.
A fractured feedback loop
Many engagements can and do drive real progress– particularly when strong coordination is involved. For example, academics from Wharton found that companies engaged by Climate Action 100+ are more likely to set verified emissions targets– proof of the power of investors working together.
Yet despite these successes, much engagement remains frustratingly opaque. Reports get written but rarely read; outcomes are claimed but seldom verified. Both companies and investors are left trying to connect the dots in the dark.
This isn’t a question of commitment– it’s a failure of the system.
Without better infrastructure, companies tune out, investors duplicate efforts, and regulators respond with requirements for more standardised reporting that may miss the real issues.
As one UK listed corporate IR put it during our last stewardship roundtable: “We send answers into the void, with no idea what happens next.”
Too often, engagement feels one-sided. Companies respond to investor questions but rarely receive meaningful feedback or closure. Understanding the difference an answer makes to investor decision-making and/or confidence is important if companies are to justify actions, and resource the interactions.
Stewardship must evolve into a genuine two-way conversation built on trust, shared knowledge, and accountability. Many investors prefer to keep these discussions private, which makes sense. Relationships rely on discretion, and going public can sometimes stall progress. But we need to ask: is it time to evolve? When key talks happen behind closed doors, it’s hard to coordinate efforts, avoid duplication, or learn from each other. Confidentiality must be balanced with enough transparency to help the system improve– if not full disclosure, then enough insight to move things forward.
Quantity vs. quality– and what we do about it
The growing volume of engagements is stretching resources thin. Even firms with dedicated stewardship teams are under strain. Redington’s 2024 Sustainable Investment Survey found that half (48%) of investment managers report having no dedicated stewardship or engagement staff. Meanwhile, the average stewardship professional is now expected to cover engagement with over 100 companies per year – a figure that more than doubled in just 12 months.
With that level of coverage comes trade-offs: less time per engagement, limited prep, and weak follow-up. Depth is being sacrificed for breadth– and with it, the credibility and potential of stewardship.
A recent article in Real Economy Progress captured this frustration from the corporate side. One investor engagement lead at a major listed company described an example: “I’ve met with sustainability people from large European asset managers, and they’ve gone in on me about how terrible it is that we rely on minimum wage workers. But we don’t– it is published all over our website that our lowest pay is significantly higher than minimum wage. They just haven’t done any prep work before coming in with their demands. That can be frustrating.”
This kind of disconnect undermines trust and wastes time on both sides. If stewardship is to mature, it must be underpinned by informed dialogue and credible, data-driven preparation.
So what’s the fix?
We can’t just call for “more people” and hope the problem goes away. Instead, we need to rethink how stewardship is resourced, prioritised, and delivered:
• Pool intelligence – Investors don’t need to duplicate effort when shared infrastructure can track past engagements, company responses, and material outcomes.
• Leverage AI – Technology can help identify high-impact engagement opportunities, flag overlapping requests, and synthesise complex reporting across firms and markets.
• Clarify accountability – Stewardship must be embedded within investment teams – but with clear lines of responsibility, proper governance, and support from specialist functions.
• Coordinate campaigns– Collaboration– when strategic and well-managed– can scale influence without scaling cost.
Ultimately, the goal isn’t just more stewardship. I t’s smarter stewardship.
Innovation must lead the way
Technology, particularly AI, offers a powerful means to address these challenges– if we embrace it. Artificial intelligence can analyse hundreds of engagements across markets, identify duplication and highlight neglected issues. It can also synthesise thousands of votes globally, assess alignment with stated policies and failures to follow through on engagement intent. It can help test hypotheses on opportunities and delivery using real-world data, and target stewardship where it can have the greatest marginal value. Yet adoption remains uneven. Some firms are innovating quickly. Others remain constrained by internal resistance or regulatory uncertainty.
A blueprint for a better system
If stewardship is to meet its potential, we need to modernise the system– not just tweak its tactics. That means:
• Shared visibility into historical and ongoing engagements
• Tools to analyse commitments, actions, and unresolved issues
• Clear prioritisation of issues that matter most
• Collaboration that reduces redundancy and amplifies influence
This isn’t a revolution. It’s overdue infrastructure. The future of stewardship lies in smarter workflows, better feedback loops, and systems that turn intention into intelligence. It requires moving beyond glossy PDFs and post-hoc storytelling towards real-time, data-driven, outcome-oriented coordination. Because the question is no longer whether stewardship matters. It’s whether we’re doing enough to make it matter.
Mais Callan is the co-founder and CEO of Impactive Tech, which recently launched its Stewardship Intelligence tool– designed to centralise and structure public engagement activity across the investment ecosystem.
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