Multi-asset impact

As the strategy’s core impact themes stem from these values, all the funds we select must be aligned in tangible ways. What’s more, all managers we invest into operate ethically, transparently and aim to benefit their communities and societies, embodying good corporate citizenship to very high degrees. 

An example is an investment into healthcare, which aims to benefit people across the globe by finding cures for multiple non-communicable diseases. Another example is from the listed equities sleeve, where the belief in systems change drives investment into environmentally-friendly technologies as these could result in more sustainable living conditions for disadvantaged and lower income populations, with a focus toward emerging markets. 

On one side, new regulatory reporting requirements such as the SFDR was a challenge for many of the smaller external managers we invest in, especially non-EU ones. Throughout the year, they were pressed for resources to gather data in order to comply with the EU regulation. We think this is an interesting paradox in the impact world where deep, grass-roots impact and top-down regulations collide. We continue to use our influence as an limited partner on several advisory boards of our managers to help guide them. 

All of the funds in the impact strategies are either leaders or professionals with their ESG scores, and either benefit stakeholders or contribute to solutions for their IMP scores. 

Adding new investments necessarily changes the ESG and IMP scores of the funds: more so on the liquid side, where market volatility does affect the scores. The challenge of building a true multi-asset portfolio diversified across multiple classes also resulted in challenging impact conversations: by financial design, the portfolio needed a sovereign bond manager, while by impact design, the investable universe of such impact managers was small: we added the manager which fit our impact and financial criteria, but it did bring down the portfolio impact score, as it had a low IMP score. 

It however is a clear ESG leader, investing in emerging markets countries which 1) defend human rights; 2) do not finance controversial activities; and 3) promotes best practices in sustainability. The manager, however, does not provide a use of proceeds for the investments, making it difficult to understand how it reaches underserved communities. We are engaging with them on the latter, hoping to eventually receive more clarity on how the investments are utilised.