Legal & General (‘L&G’) has launched a new ‘Expression of Wish’ digital service in partnership
with Tumelo, allowing trustees to identify the ESG issues that matter most to their members and encouraging direct
dialogue between trustees, members and the industry-leading Legal & General Investment Management (‘LGIM’)
Investment Stewardship team.

The first of its kind service is being launched via the Tumelo platform with NatWest, one of Legal & General’s largest
trust-based clients with almost 70,000 members. The expectation is that after an initial three-month period, the
service will be available to LGIM’s DC trustee client base, which represents 2.15m scheme members in the UK, as
well as other interested LGIM clients.

This follows the launch of the Tumelo partnership in September 2020, when LGIM was the first corporate pension
provider to officially roll out their platform across its DC pension schemes. The service currently enables hundreds
of thousands of members to see which companies they have in their pension, as well as have a say on issues they
care most about such as diversity and inclusion, biodiversity and climate change, executive remuneration and
human rights.

Georgia Stewart, Chief Executive at Tumelo said, “We are already seeing the benefits of better member
engagement on various issues since we launched, with data across members demonstrating a significant increase.
The new service will allow Trustees to engage more directly with LGIM’s Stewardship team and better represent
members views through an expression of wish.”

The latest development, initially aimed at DC pension schemes, will enable pension scheme trustees to express
their views* and trustee policies on upcoming AGM votes – informed by the views of their members – directly to the
LGIM stewardship team and streamline the dialogue between the two. The service – specifically designed for
trustees – will facilitate two-way communication, allowing them to feed views into LGIM’s voting experts and
understand how and why LGIM voted. The creation of a digital feedback loop provides trustees with real time
updates of how LGIM voted and detailed rationale of why, shortly after the vote.

Commenting on the launch, Stuart Murphy, Co-Head of Defined Contribution at Legal & General said,
“Expression of wish makes feedback seamless and will support pension scheme trustees with their additional
regulatory reporting and decision-making responsibilities in an easy, navigable way. Most exciting is that it allows
for a more direct dialogue with the LGIM investment stewardship team, ensuring they can feed in members’ views
into their voting and engagement process.”

The implementation of the new product has been driven by an increasing public and member interest in the
underlying holdings of their pensions but also due to the direction of new regulation1
that requires pension schemes and their trustees to have better oversight of the voting implementation process.

Alison Robb, Trustee at the NatWest Group Defined Contribution Scheme, which will be the first client to
use the service, said, “This service will enable us as Trustee to engage more closely with LGIM’s stewardship
team and understand how they are voting in practice. This will help us develop our voting policies and communicate
with our pension scheme members who are increasingly engaged with what companies are in their pension but also
the issues that they care most about.”