Our CEO is briefed on our responsible investment activities through 1:1 discussions and at Partner meetings.   One of our partners has firm-wide responsibility for oversight as well. Our heads of Fixed Income and Equities are also briefed and are key in driving our efforts within their respective business units.  Our PMs drive discussions in research reviews on material ESG issues.   Our analysts are accountable for ensuring ESG issues are addressed as part of their research, and discuss them in research review meetings with PMs.   Each team implements this differently within their own research and investment decision process.  

Oversight/Accountability: Responsible Investment Committee: A key element of our ESG management structure is our Responsible Investment Committee that we created in 2011 at the time we signed the PRI. Our RI Committee has a diverse global membership, including senior representatives from our fixed income and equity investment organization, our client-facing teams, and our Legal Department. The composition of our RI Committee reflects our integration-oriented focus on ESG issues. This Committee develops our ESG strategy and thought leadership in partnership with investment teams, monitors our firm's progress on RI strategy and implementation, and provides ESG-related advice to our investment and client teams.   

Implementation Responsibility: Our fundamental research analysts have primary responsibility for incorporating ESG factors into the research process. We believe bottom-up ESG integration in fundamental company research analysis is an important part of identifying investment risks as well as opportunities. As such, within our separate asset-class-specific investment teams, Chief Investment Officers/Portfolio Managers are responsible for overseeing the integration of ESG factors into our investment processes, and ensuring that potential ESG issues are appropriately identified, raised, researched, and addressed. Our disciplined fundamental research processes have long included the analysis of ESG factors, in many cases well before AB signed the PRI in 2011.

As noted above, we have dedicated resources to provide valuable guidance to our investment teams, and ESG integration in client portfolios remains the primary responsibility of Portfolio Managers and Analysts. When AB became a PRI signatory in November 2011, we created a management infrastructure for responsible investment leadership that drives strategy and ensures commitment to these issues firm-wide.  We have the equivalent of more than 13 full-time professionals focused on various aspects of ESG:

• Responsible Investment team: Our Head of Responsible Investment dedicates most of her time to responsible investment-related activities. These include focusing on the firm's ESG strategy, enhancing AB's processes on ESG integration, marketing, training and products. She is involved in related industry organizations and keeps abreast of ESG-related best practices and relevant industry trends. We have an ESG Analyst to work with our equity and fixed income investment teams to identify trends, themes and case studies and to assist with all aspects of ESG monitoring.  In addition, we have a Governance Analyst and a Proxy and ESG Associate who are responsible for Proxy voting and ESG projects. Our Senior Portfolio Manager - RI works on product development and thought leadership. The RI team also maintains the ESG engagement framework and conducts numerous meetings covering a wide variety of ESG topics. Together this is nearly five full time positions.
• The Portfolio Manager and analysts on our N50 Frontier Markets portfolio dedicate the equivalent of four FTEs to ESG.
• Our Sustainable Global Thematic Portfolio manager and the analysts on his team dedicate the equivalent of two FTEs to our ESG activities.
• Within fixed income, we have a portfolio manager dedicated full-time to our Municipal Impact strategy, as well as, a team of professionals, including the Champion of the RI Committee who is the Director of Income Strategies and a partner of the firm also responsible for the firm’s diversity and inclusions initiatives, and representatives from Portfolio Management, Research and Risk, who work together to support ESG integration across fixed income. Taken together this is equivalent to roughly two full time positions.

While these dedicated resources provide valuable guidance to our investment teams, ESG integration in client portfolios remains the primary responsibility of Portfolio Managers and Analysts. 

Fundamental Research Analysts: Our analysts have primary responsibility for incorporating ESG factors into the research process.  We believe bottom-up ESG integration in fundamental company research analysis is an important part of identifying investment risks as well as opportunities. As such, within our separate asset-class-specific investment teams, Chief Investment Officers/Portfolio Managers are responsible for overseeing the integration of ESG factors into our investment processes, and ensuring that potential ESG issues are appropriately identified, raised, research, and addressed. Our disciplined fundamental research processes have long included the analysis of ESG factors, in many cases well before AB signed the PRI in 2011.

Our CIOs and Portfolio Managers are ultimately responsible to ensure that climate-related issues are addressed by the analysts. Our analysts evaluate climate-related issues as part of their research assessment, focusing on each company's climate strategy, the political and regulatory backdrop, potential environmental liabilities and greenhouse-gas emissions.   Several of our CIOs seek investment opportunities in companies that are focusing on addressing climate issues, including investing in renewable energy and projects to support a low carbon economy.   

At AB, all of our analysts – both equity and fixed income -- are evaluated based on a variety of factors. Investment performance in client portfolios is the primary factor, along with other qualitative factors. As discussed in more detail elsewhere in this document, all AB analysts include ESG factors in their research processes. Thus, by the nature of their inclusion, ESG factors are reflected in our firm’s performance management process. 

In addition to that, the extent to which performance management, reward and/or personal development processes have a responsible investment element may vary per investment strategy. For our investment strategies that go beyond ESG integration, the element may be larger.