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Sustainability

Moving forward with our clients

Moving forward with our clients

Environmental and social challenges are changing the investment landscape and creating new responsibilities for financial market players. Allocating capital to responsible economic activities allows us to grow our clients’ wealth for future generations, while helping to shape a sustainable economy.


Responsible investment      

As responsible managers of capital, we must, on the one hand, consider how sustainability challenges affect our investments. Ensuring that investments meet regulatory, social and environmental criteria in the ever-evolving investment landscape is key to seizing the opportunities and navigating the risks arising from sustainability challenges and thus for securing stable, long-term returns.

In our view, companies with an appropriate management structure and the ability to mitigate environmental and social risks ultimately have a more viable business model. Responsible investment allows us to support our clients in making informed choices and to provide them with investment solutions that enable them to combine attractive performance with personal values and convictions.

At the same time, we are equally aware that our investments have an impact on the world around us. Channelling capital towards responsible investment solutions allows us to manage this impact and helps us to play a role in contributing to a sustainable economy.

Since signing up to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI) in 2012, we have continually enhanced our expertise and product offering in responsible investment. UBP’s Responsible Investment Policy (RI Policy) has been regularly expanded and enhanced to reflect our growing commitment in this field. It outlines UBP’s approach to exclusions, ESG integration and sustainable investing, including impact investing.

Impact Investing

Addressing the world’s most pressing environmental and societal challenges requires more than doing business responsibly: it requires disruptive and innovative solutions that address challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, poverty and inequality.

We are therefore determined to identify companies and sectors that can deliver a positive impact alongside financial returns. This allows investors to align their financial objectives of investing in companies that show strong growth potential with their ethical desire to support companies that are having a concrete, positive impact.

The power of the financial sector lies in identifying companies that will thrive in the transformation that is under way and directing investments towards them. Besides the positive environmental or social impact, we see impact investing as a way to generate superior returns over the long term by focusing on the engines of the new economy.

UBP is seizing this opportunity as a pioneer in impact investing. We have an established range of strategies generating both social and environmental impact, with the latest addition focusing on companies that are protecting and/or restoring biodiversity.

Our success in impact investing rests on a highly efficient analysis framework structured around six themes which tie in with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): climate stability, healthy ecosystems, sustainable communities, health and well-being, basic needs, and inclusive and fair economies. Our proprietary scoring system “IMAP”, which considers the intentionality, materiality, additionality and potential of companies, is also key, helping us to assesses the impact-intensity of a company’s business model. Engaging with investee companies is a cornerstone of our impact investing approach as it is the best way to understand the true “intentionality” of a company.

More about responsible investment

“It is only by making sustainability the centre of everyone’s investment approach that we will collectively make big changes.”
 

Karine Jesiolowski, Head of Responsible Investment, Asset Management

More about impact investing

Investing for profitable positive impact

How we live our lives and how we choose to invest our savings have typically been worlds apart. Happily, it has recently become possible to bring these two elements much closer together.

Assessing the impact intensity of companies

Union Bancaire Privée is taking a unique approach to impact investing. Interview with Simon Pickard and Mathieu Nègre.

Impact investing in emerging markets post COVID-19

2020 has been a real stress test for impact investors in terms of balancing impact and financial returns.

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Awards

For several years now, the Bank, its managers and its funds have regularly received awards from independent research institutes.

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