At Riverbridge, there are no shortcuts to choosing responsible investments. We take a bottom-up, human-oriented research approach.

Riverbridge’s approach to responsible investing is distinguished by its authenticity, history, and inherent philosophical integration. Responsible investing is not an approach we have adopted as a recent add-on to our offerings or in response to market demand. Rather, our investment philosophy has been grounded in a mindset of responsible investing since our founding in 1987. Responsible investing is the longstanding bedrock of how we see the very purpose of companies and capital markets and consistently impacts all of our strategies.

At Riverbridge, we believe that the use of negative screens to find the most responsible companies limits our ability to find the companies that make the most compelling business investment. We prefer to dig into a company’s fundamentals through our in-depth research process. This approach avoids:

• Greenwashing/bias towards surface-level marketing
• Bias against small-cap companies lacking resources to produce competitive ESG-specific material
• Companies slipping through the cracks of various screens

Riverbridge’s proprietary research serves as the basis for our investment team’s decisions. This ensures that our responsible investing considerations are grounded in our long-standing investment philosophy. The vast majority of our research is internally produced and stems from our investment team’s due diligence, including interactions with companies and their ecosystems. Riverbridge subscribes to third-party sources such as MSCI to give our team and our clients visibility into how the outcomes of our responsible investing approach measure up to industry standards. In providing third-party impact metrics in this report, we are mindful of the potential shortcomings of third party ratings including:

• Inconsistencies in company evaluation results between various third party rating agencies due to differences in evaluation approaches and criteria
• A rating bias against companies lacking resources to produce competitive ESG-specific material
• Third party ratings reflect a historical period of time and may not take into account future initiatives a company may be working on

Both strategies are multi-cap strategies and are very similar in composition. The primary difference is one of designation— Eco Leaders® was created with an explicit ESG mandate. The two strategies have separate inception dates and track records; therefore, there are slight variances in position sizes between companies. Over time, the two strategies have largely converged due to the following factors:

• Recent recognition by management teams that one cannot take shortcuts to build a sustainable business
• Increased focus on sustainability by company management that has allowed Riverbridge to become more comfortable in adding certain companies to our Eco Leaders® portfolio from a responsible investing perspective

Yes. Riverbridge relies on its own research to select each of the companies in its strategies.

Yes, Riverbridge has a formal Responsible Investing Policy that is reviewed annually and can be found here.

Each member of our investment team is responsible for the implementation of our responsible investing policy. The Riverbridge investment team is responsible for continuing to monitor whether the companies we own demonstrate the aspects of our investment criteria and are sustainably building their long-term earnings power. Our investment team provides oversight on Riverbridge’s responsible investing efforts, including our PRI reporting process, the development of our Annual Report, and other related activities.

At a firmwide level, we actively seek out opportunities to engage in industry discussions and regularly attend conferences held by entities shown below. We are a PRI signatory and as this space evolves we look forward to continuing to learn from others.