The pace of change facing businesses and investors accelerated noticeably in 2025. Regulatory expectations continued to tighten across climate, supply chain and data governance. Geopolitical uncertainty continued to reshape how companies think about operational resilience. Artificial intelligence moved from a topic of strategic interest to a source of immediate, practical disruption, altering business models, competitive dynamics and the nature of risk itself. In that context, the question we keep returning to is not whether sustainability is relevant to value; it is whether we are doing it with sufficient rigour and focus to make a difference.

This is our fifth annual Responsible Investment Report, and it reflects what we believe has been our most substantive year of delivery to date. Across the portfolio, we formalised supply chain expectations for companies with material exposure and ran a structured programme across seven businesses to move from fragmented initiatives to a repeatable, risk-based approach. We also strengthened cybersecurity capabilities significantly across both the firm and the portfolio, including the introduction of continuous monitoring, now covering 95% of portfolio companies, and quarterly CTO huddles that have become a substantive forum for peer exchange across management teams. At the company level, ProductLife Group had its near-term Science Based Target externally validated by the SBTi, a milestone driven by customer procurement requirements that illustrates how decarbonisation is increasingly a commercial issue.

What we find more instructive than any individual initiative is the shift in how these topics connect. Climate, supply chain resilience, cybersecurity, and indeed sustainability as a whole, are no longer parallel workstreams to be managed independently. They are increasingly facets of the same underlying question: how can we help build a business whose value is durable in a world where the operating environment changes faster than any management team can fully anticipate? Our sustainability programme is most useful to portfolio companies when it helps management teams see those connections and act on them, not simply address each topic in turn.

Artificial intelligence is where this has begun to play out most directly from a governance perspective. While the broader investment implications of AI are covered in Peter’s foreword, our focus and thought has been on what responsible adoption looks like in practice for Oakley as a firm, and for the businesses we back. It is an ongoing piece of work, with meaningful progress in 2025, including the establishment of an AI committee bringing together stakeholders from across the business and launch of a training programme across teams.

Our people remain the foundation of everything we describe in this report. An 83% participation rate in our employee survey, over 1,000 mystery coffee matches, and a mentoring programme now fully embedded across the firm are metrics that reflect a culture that we believe makes us better investors, better partners to management teams, and a better place to build careers. The same conviction applies to the portfolio companies highlighted here, from Assured Data Protection's employee-led values refresh to Brevo's transparent accountability framework for gender equality. Strong culture is not a soft output; it is a signal of organisational health that matters to long-term performance.

As we look ahead, the focus is on depth over breadth. Our sustainability programme has grown considerably in scope; the task now is to ensure that what we do delivers measurable outcomes, for portfolio companies, for their stakeholders, and ultimately for our investors. Responsible investment means little if it stays at the level of process. It has to reach the decisions that actually shape businesses. That is the standard we are working towards, and this report is an account of how far we have come and how much further there is to go.

Aga Siemiginowska
Head of Sustainability, Oakley Capital