Before your next stewardship report, investor update, or trustee meeting, ask yourself: Can you actually prove your stewardship created value?
As an institutional asset manager, you likely have hundreds of engagement records. You can demonstrate you attended meetings. You documented what companies said. You filed voting reports on time.
You’re compliant. But here’s the critical question: can you evidence that any of it mattered?
The gap between activity logging and decision-useful stewardship intelligence is costing the industry credibility and it’s about to cost more. With the revised UK Stewardship Code 2026 and fiduciary scrutiny intensifying, the question is no longer “Did we engage?” It’s “Can we prove our stewardship decisions were sound?”
Crucially, this checklist helps you find where your evidence chain breaks. That break is where your infrastructure investment needs to go.
The Evidence-Readiness Checklist
Run each engagement and voting decision through these four levels:
Level 1: Activity Log
☐ We attended the meeting / cast the vote
What this proves: Compliance. You can tick a box.
What it doesn’t prove: Anything about stewardship quality, investment judgement, or fiduciary accountability.
The problem: Many organisations still stop here, treating stewardship as a recording exercise rather than an investment discipline.
Level 2: Interaction Evidence
☐ We can show what we asked and what the company said
☐ We documented the company’s response and reasoning
What this proves: A conversation happened. There was professional engagement with the investee company.
What it doesn’t prove: Change. Influence. Impact on the portfolio.
The trap: Many stewardship frameworks reward Level 2. It feels robust because you have detailed records. But detailed records of conversations that went nowhere still aren’t investment intelligence.
Level 3: Change Evidence
☐ We can show what changed (behaviour, disclosure, policy, governance)
☐ We can date the change relative to our engagement and escalation
☐ We can explain why we believe our actions contributed
What this proves: Something shifted. There’s a plausible connection between your stewardship activity and corporate behaviour.
What this is: The threshold where stewardship actually begins. You’re no longer just logging activity, you’re tracking outcomes.
The challenge: Attribution is hard. Companies respond to multiple pressures. But if you can’t articulate a defensible theory of contribution, you’re not doing stewardship, you’re hoping for correlation.
Level 4: Portfolio Impact
☐ We can connect the change to portfolio risk/return
☐ We have a theory of change another investment professional could scrutinise
☐ We’d be comfortable presenting this to a skeptical stakeholder
What this proves: Fiduciary value. Investment judgement. Professional stewardship.
What this requires: Infrastructure. Not just better note-taking, but systematic evidence chains that connect stewardship decisions to portfolio outcomes.
Why this matters: This is decision-useful stewardship intelligence. This is what trustees need. This is what the Code expects when it asks whether your stewardship is effective.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most reporting sits at Levels 1–2..
You have activity logs. You have meeting notes. You may even have beautifully formatted engagement reports with company logos and ESG themes. But when a trustee asks “How do we know this engagement programme is worth the cost?”, can you answer with Level 3 evidence?
Many frameworks reward Level 2.
Industry surveys ask: Did you engage? How many meetings? What topics? The incentive structure rewards volume and documentation, not evidence of influence or portfolio protection.
Fiduciary accountability requires Level 4.
Asset owners are asking harder questions. Regulators are expecting substantive demonstrations of effectiveness. Beneficiaries want to know their capital is being protected through active ownership, not passive box-ticking.
The gap between what most organisations have and what accountability now requires isn’t just a training problem. It’s an infrastructure problem.
How to Use This Checklist
Step 1: Audit your current state
Take three recent engagement cases. Score them honestly against the four levels. Where does your evidence chain typically break?
Step 2: Identify the systemic issue
Is the break at Level 2? You need better interaction documentation.
Is it at Level 3? You need systematic change tracking and attribution frameworks.
Is it at Level 4? You need infrastructure that connects stewardship outcomes to portfolio analysis.
Step 3: Invest where it breaks
Stop adding more activity logging. Stop producing more meeting notes in better formats. Invest in the infrastructure that closes the gap between where you are and where fiduciary accountability requires you to be.
The Infrastructure Question
If you can’t systematically evidence that your stewardship created value, you have three options:
- Keep doing what you’re doing and hope scrutiny doesn’t intensify (it will)
- Hire more people to manually build evidence chains case-by-case (expensive, doesn’t scale)
- Invest in infrastructure that makes Level 4 evidence systematic
The organisations that move first won’t just survive the next wave of regulatory scrutiny; they’ll use stewardship intelligence as a competitive advantage.
The market is moving from “Did you engage?” to “Can you prove it mattered?”
And the only way to answer that question at scale is with infrastructure designed for Level 4 from the start.
About Maanch
Maanch builds stewardship intelligence infrastructure for institutional investors who need to move beyond activity logging to decision-useful evidence. Our platform is designed around one principle: if you can’t connect stewardship to portfolio impact, you’re doing compliance, not fiduciary stewardship.
Curious whether your evidence chain would survive stakeholder scrutiny? Let’s talk about what Level 4 infrastructure actually requires.Contact us | Learn more about stewardship intelligence
