Opening Remarks

At Bregal, we have always viewed responsible investing as an important driver of business resilience, long-term value creation, and effective risk management. We aim to build great businesses and create long-term value for our investors, while having a positive impact on society - and responsible investing is central to delivering on both. This is particularly relevant in today's more uncertain and rapidly evolving environment.

This year, we have continued to work closely with portfolio companies and General Partners, focusing our engagement where it can drive the most meaningful outcomes. Our approach has remained deliberately targeted and tailored to each business, with initiatives identified through active engagement and ongoing relationship management. This allows us to prioritize the areas where, together with management teams, we see the greatest potential to unlock operational improvements, strengthen commercial positioning, and enhance resilience.

Across our direct strategies, we drove a broad range of initiatives, from energy management to product development and workforce engagement, with sustainability increasingly embedded within commercial offerings. Our Sustainable Development Financing program continues to support this work by enabling targeted investment into value-accretive initiatives. This year, we deployed four loans across the portfolio, supporting projects such as fleet decarbonization and renewable energy adoption.

Drawing on our active engagement and consistently strong data collection across the portfolio, we have further developed our ability to directly quantify the financial contribution of these initiatives, including their impact on EBITDA and cash flow, demonstrating strong correlations and informing priority engagements. We will continue to build on this capability over the coming year.

Across our indirect strategies, we have applied the same targeted and engagement-led approach. Over the past year, we worked closely with 91 General Partners, providing structured feedback through our Responsible Investing scorecards and supporting them in strengthening their practices through ongoing engagement. This included launching our Responsible Investing Roundtable series, bringing together more than 20 participants to share practical insights and support peer-to-peer learning. We also established a responsible investing framework for our Secondaries strategy, ensuring a consistent approach as we expand into new asset classes.

We have also continued to deepen our focus on key thematic areas. Across the portfolio, we have supported a range of climate-related initiatives consistent with our Climate and Nature Action Plan. In parallel, we have rolled out Cybersecurity and AI Readiness assessments across our portfolio and General Partners, reflecting our view that governance frameworks in both areas need to be established now, before adoption outpaces oversight.

Looking ahead, responsible investing will continue to evolve alongside the broader operating landscape. Our priority is to remain responsive to where risks and opportunities are most material — including climate resilience, cybersecurity, and AI readiness — and to ensure that our engagement continues to drive outcomes that are measurable, not merely reported.

Responsible investing is not a separate workstream at Bregal. It is integral to how we create value, and to how we meet our obligations to the investors, businesses, and communities we serve. We are proud of the progress we continue to make together, and deeply grateful to our portfolio companies and General Partners for their commitment and engagement.