The Liontrust Sustainable Investment team manages a broad range of funds across equities, bonds, and managed funds.
Our investment process
The investment process seeks to generate strong returns from investing in companies aiming to deliver profits through positive social and environmental impacts. The fund managers look at the world through the prism of three mega trends – Better resource efficiency (cleaner), Improved health (healthier) and Greater safety and resilience (safer) – and then 22 themes within these.
If a company has significant exposure to one of the themes, the fund managers verify how sustainable the rest of its activities are. For each company, the fund managers determine the ESG factors that are important indicators of future success and assess how well these are managed, via the proprietary Liontrust Sustainability Matrix.
Companies in which the fund managers invest will have robust business fundamentals with a proven ability to deliver high returns of equity (RoE) through sustaining margins and asset turnover. Typically, these companies have a maintainable competitive advantage through scale, technology or business model.
Sustainability Focus label
All 10 of the UK-domiciled funds managed by the Sustainable Investment team have adopted the Sustainability Focus label under the Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) from 1 April 2025. This makes it one of the largest ranges of funds to adopt a SDR label, covering equity, fixed income and managed funds. The Sustainability Focus label is intended for a fund that “invests mainly in assets that focus on sustainability for people or the planet”. The Liontrust funds also meet an additional key requirement of the labelling regime by investing at least 70% of their total assets in sustainable investments.

Funds managed by the team
Funds managed by the team
Meet the team
The team has been managing the Sustainable Future funds for over 20 years. A key differentiator is the fact all the sustainable elements are fully integrated within a single team. The team is headed by Peter Michaelis, who was previously head of SRI at Aviva Investors and has been managing the SF funds since launch. The team joined as part of Liontrust’s acquisition of Alliance Trust Investments (ATI), and were previously running the Sustainable Future fund range at Aviva Investors. The other lead equity managers are Simon Clements (who was formerly head of global equities at Aviva Investors) along with Martyn Jones and Chris Foster, who joined the management training programme at ATI as graduates. Fixed income investments are managed by Kenny Watson (formerly at Ignis Asset Management), Aitken Ross and Jack Willis who also started their careers in the graduate scheme at ATI, and Connor Godsell. Harriet Parker leads on engagement activities across the team.