Responsible business

Responsible citizen

We strive to be a responsible member of our community and influence positive change​.

We contribute to our broader community through philanthropic and cultural partnerships, via the Columbia Threadneedle Foundation. We are committed to managing our environmental footprint, to ensure we understand, measure and manage the environmental impacts resulting from our business activities. We are also cognisant of our responsibility to support a sustainable supply chain.

We see corporate philanthropy as investment in the future. Columbia Threadneedle Foundation invests in selected charities via multi-year, engaged partnerships – an approach which we believe not only delivers measurable improvement to individual lives, but will bring long-term benefit to the broader community by helping to address critical social issues and drive lasting social change.

When selecting our charity partners, we look for sustainable growth potential supported by experienced management and leadership, with clear strategic vision. We seek to build long-term collaborative partnerships where we provide both funding and active support in the form of management and employee involvement. We have a thematic focus on charities that use education, art and sport to engender social change.

Columbia threadneedle foundation

The work of Columbia Threadneedle Foundation builds on Ameriprise Financial’s 120 year history of community support and commitment to organisations whose shared goal is to improve the lives of individuals from all walks of life.

In 2019 the Foundation celebrated its fifth anniversary. To mark this milestone, we undertook an impact evaluation and are proud to provide this snapshot of the results.

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Our employee-led Environmental Advisory Group (EAG) focuses on identifying, measuring and reducing the major environmental impacts resulting from our business activities, internally and in the wider community. These major impacts consist of travel, waste and usage of energy, water and raw materials.

Columbia Threadneedle recognises the importance of environmental stewardship and maintains an Environmental Management System (EMS) to ensure measurable and auditable data is accurately maintained for all our major environmental impacts. Some of the key EMS achievements for 2019 are: the successful delivery of waste management and world environment day staff engagement campaigns focussing on plastics and removal of plastic cutlery, continued supply chain and life cycle assessments and a reduction in paper usage through ‘follow me’ printing.

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We continued to meet all requirements for the ISO14001:2015 standard throughout 2019 and our total carbon emissions were 18.6% lower than in 2018, a reduction primarily due to reduced air travel.

Columbia Threadneedle carbon emissions 2015 – 2019

Columbia Threadneedle UK carbon footprint

Source: Travel data includes all UK employees Energy data is for Cannon Place London.

In 2018, the EAG has set some challenging new EMS objectives and targets, including further reductions in business travel, utility usage and refuse generation, and engagement with our broader supply chain to explore environmental efficiencies.

Keep cup initiative

Paper cups have plastic or wax lining which makes them difficult to recycle. Most UK paper cups will go to ‘energy from waste’ or landfill, instead of being recycled. In 2019, we provided each employee with a Keep Cup, saving the waste of 350,000 paper cups per annum, at an ongoing cost of £15,500.00. By doing so we also reduced our carbon footprint and further strengthened our ISO14001:2015 continuous improvement requirement.

We are a living wage employer

We have been a Living Wage employer since 2015, which means everyone working at Columbia Threadneedle in the UK, regardless of whether they are permanent employees or third-party contractors, receives a minimum hourly wage of £10.75 in London and £9.30 outside London – significantly higher than the national minimum wage of £8.21. Columbia Threadneedle has also met with other occupiers to ensure that the London Living Wage is paid to any contractors engaged by the landlord of our head office building Cannon Place.

We are a living wage employer

The Living Wage is set independently and updated annually, calculated according to the basic cost of living using the Minimum Income Standard for the UK. Decisions about what to include in this standard are set by the public; it is therefore a social consensus about what people need to make ends meet. We continue to work with our suppliers to reduce the environmental and social impacts along our value chain. In 2019 this included working with our stationery, printing, waste management and cleaning contractors and landlords to implement ways of reducing our sustainability impacts. Columbia Threadneedle complies with the Modern Slavery Act (MSA) and publishes an MSA statement on our website as per the requirement for public disclosure.