ACT Signatory Journey: we have long believed culture is a material driver of long-term outcomes
Image: Hannah Rosley
Hannah Rosley, UK investor relations at Comgest, shares how the employee-owned partnership has built a culture grounded in trust and open debate, and how the company values are integrated with the group’s investment philosophy
How is corporate culture featuring in your conversations with clients?
Culture is featuring more prominently in client conversations than ever before. Increasingly, clients want to understand not just how we invest, but who we are as a firm, our values, how decisions are made, and whether our internal culture is consistent with the principles we look for in the companies we own. For Comgest, that conversation comes naturally. Our partnership model, our flat structure, and our five core values, quality, courage, partnership, integrity and care are not separate from our investment philosophy; they are an expression of it. Clients find that coherence reassuring.
Why was it important for Comgest to become an ACT Signatory?
Becoming an ACT Signatory in 2025 was a natural step for us. We have long believed that culture, both internally and within the companies we invest, is a material driver of long-term outcomes. Formalising that commitment through ACT sends a clear signal to clients, investee companies, and our own people that we hold ourselves to the same standards we seek in others. It also connects us to a broader community of like-minded asset managers working to advance best practice in this area, which we see as genuinely valuable.
How would you describe the culture at Comgest? Why is this important for business and investment returns?
Comgest is an employee-owned partnership, and that shapes everything. Our founders deliberately designed the firm to give people the autonomy to express themselves, contribute meaningfully, and grow over time. The result is a culture grounded in trust, open debate, and shared accountability, one where colleagues are genuinely encouraged to speak their minds, even when their views differ from others within the team. This matters for investment returns because our process is high-conviction and consensus-driven. Good decisions require honest, rigorous debate, and that only happens in an environment where people feel safe to speak up. We also believe that diverse teams, across nationality, background, and perspective, are better equipped to identify risk and opportunity than homogeneous ones. With 30 nationalities across our 190 employees and near gender parity firm-wide, that diversity is already a reality at Comgest.
Tell us about some of the internal staff initiatives at Comgest.
Several initiatives reflect our commitment to an inclusive and engaged workforce. Our "Our People Working Group" (OPWG) brings together employees from across the firm to advise on culture and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), reporting directly to the Corporate Responsibility Committee. Bi-weekly open forum meetings give all staff a platform to raise topics, ask questions, and shape firm-wide discussions. We maintain a target of 50% female interns across our investment teams and provide unconscious bias training to hiring managers. We also offer employees the opportunity to engage in philanthropic activity through The Comgest Foundation, which has supported 58 projects globally since 2017.
When your fund managers are choosing investments for their portfolios, how do they engage with firms on culture? Are there any measurements or markers in the corporate world that are useful?
Culture is embedded in our due diligence process rather than treated as a box-ticking exercise. As quality growth investors, we place significant weight on assessing the intangible qualities of a business, and culture is one of the most important of these. Our analysts and portfolio managers spend considerable time with company management, not just to assess strategy and financials, but to understand how decisions are made, whether leadership is transparent, and whether the values stated publicly are reflected in how the business actually operates. These intangibles are harder to quantify than a balance sheet, but in our experience they are often just as revealing of a company's long-term prospects. Some useful markers include staff turnover, the quality of internal communication, how companies handle mistakes, and whether there is genuine alignment between senior leadership and broader employee culture. Governance structures, remuneration design, and the consistency of management behaviour over time are also telling. Ultimately, we are looking for companies where culture is a source of competitive advantage and long-term resilience, not a reputational afterthought.
How important is industry-wide collaboration on culture and governance?
It is increasingly important. No single asset manager can move the needle on corporate culture alone. Collaborative engagement, whether through investor groups, stewardship initiatives, or frameworks like ACT, amplifies the signal we send to companies and helps establish shared expectations across the market. Comgest participates in a number of such initiatives, including the 30% Club France Investor Group, and we see real value in sharing what works and learning from peers. The more consistent the message from the investment community, the more likely boards and management teams are to take culture and governance seriously as long-term value drivers.
What would you say to investment managers considering signing up to ACT?
Do it! But mean it. The value of ACT comes not from the Signatory status itself, but from the genuine commitment it represents. If your internal culture is already values-driven, ACT provides a useful framework for articulating and developing that further. If it is not, then signing up is an opportunity to ask hard questions about where the gaps are and how to address them. Either way, the process of engaging with the framework is worthwhile. Clients, regulators, and your own people are paying closer attention to culture than they were five years ago, and rightly so.