Conning's drive to enhance its ESG methodology and ensure its investment portfolios are fully climate aware impressed the judges, and it picks up this year's insurance asset manager of the year title.

Recognising climate change risks and the relevance to Conning's insurance client base, the asset manager has developed climate specific dashboards.

These have been designed to enable its portfolio managers and clients to be able to better identify, measure, manage, control and report the physical and transition risks that relate to a transition to a low carbon economy at a portfolio level.

In line with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) Conning says its climate dashboards report on the distribution of the carbon intensity of the underlying issuers within a portfolio and the weighted average carbon intensity of the portfolio.

Conning's Risk Solutions team has also recently developed a Climate Risk Analyzer tool that provides clients with cloud-based scenario analysis based on their own asset allocation. The tool combines climate stress tests with stochastic modelling to enable clients to meet the solvency requirements for climate risk, develop strategic modelling and decision making and meet some aspects of TCFD and Principles for Responsible Investment reporting.

Other climate risk factors now integrated into Conning's investment process include MSCI carbon emissions intensity scores and MSCI climate transition risk scores.

InsuranceERM's judging panel was also impressed by Conning's strong customer satisfaction scores. In Conning's 2021 client survey, 97% of clients indicated they were "very satisfied" or "satisfied". The asset manager said nearly 60% of the survey respondents have been clients for at least the last decade.

Conning's expertise in the Lloyd's market – where it the largest third-party asset manager in the market by managing agents' public disclosures – stood out. Conning says it was the first manager, for example, to successfully invest in a bank loan separately managed account for a Lloyd's syndicate.