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Impact integration – advancing reporting & management practices in pension funds

Our Pensions for Purpose Impact Lens research, commissioned by Impact Frontiers, captures views on how impact reporting is used – and what needs to change to support better investment decisions.

Posted on Jul 21, 2025

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This Pensions for Purpose Impact Lens report, commissioned by Impact Frontiers and supported by the Operating Principles for Impact Management, investigates how impact reporting feeds into decision-making, the current status of impact reporting in UK pension funds and ways to include impact considerations into the investment process.

We conducted 23 interviews, with 15 pension funds, two asset managers, two investment advisers and one development finance institution. These discussions were designed to explore:

  • How and why pension funds allocate to impact.
  • How pension funds assess impact practices and performance.
  • How asset owners use impact reports.
  • How to improve impact integration.

Read the full report         Read the press release


Data collection
We asked the interviewees 17 questions, aiming to gather insights into how they currently allocate to impact, assess impact practices and performance, whether information within impact reports influences investment allocation decisions, and ways in which managers could improve the quality of the impact reports they provide.

Report's findings
  • Impact reports are underused in decision-making, with few pension funds engaging deeply with their content.
  • Data remains a challenge to impact reporting for asset managers, with regard to quality, consistency and the burden of collection. Data comparability also remains a challenge.
  • There are several barriers to integration, from the complexity of balancing risk, return and impact, to the need for impact literacy within pension funds.
  • Competing priorities exist, with standardisation versus flexibility and the use of quantitative versus qualitative data.

Learn more here