Citywire Selector: Private equity firms have been eager to show their investors they are taking responsible investing seriously and have stepped up recruitment, but the role of ‘head of ESG’ has not yet become commonplace.
Funds Europe: Impax Asset Management, a listed asset manager with a focus on ESG, saw assets under management (AUM) jump by nearly 50% based on net flows over six months.
Institutional Asset Manager: Sixty-six per cent of pension funds surveyed intend to increase their allocations to ‘S’ pillar passive funds over the next three years, while 67 per cent will select their passive manager based on their track record of delivery of their clients’ social agenda.
Institutional Investor: Smaller companies are being overlooked by investors with an environmental, social, and governance mandate. Corporate and public pensions, endowments, and foundations invest the majority of assets earmarked for ESG into the largest public companies.
Investment Week: Asset managers are uniquely positioned to support businesses and accelerate their impact. Gone are the days that ESG fell squarely on the shoulders of the largest corporates – we must all be part of the solution.
Yahoo Finance: One after another, the high-profile hires came in recent months, and in each case, they were handed some iteration of the same mandate: To help their new employers safeguard and grow their burgeoning green-finance businesses.
Forbes: What do you do as an investor if you can see that an asset class is attractive in terms of the hard numbers, but doesn’t work when it comes to the increasingly important, but softer, considerations of ESG – environmental, social and governance investing?
BNN Bloomberg: If the U.K. finance sector were a country, it would have a bigger carbon footprint than Canada, according to a report from Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund.
International Investment: Greenwashing is top of the worry list for investors when it comes to responsible investing, with 44% concerned that ESG investments were not what they claimed to be, according to research conducted by Quilter.
BNN Bloomberg: Deutsche Bank AG is accelerating a push to align its business with environmental, social and governance criteria as global lenders increasingly move toward green finance.
Yahoo Finance: The head of sustainable finance at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. says the Wall Street firm is now experimenting with green equity, adding its weight to a new category of climate-friendly assets.
Institutional Asset Manager: Corlytics ESG Monitoring is a single dashboard offering structured, analysed and visualised ESG-specific regulatory information which is rapidly evolving among global financial regulators.
BNN Bloomberg: The European Parliament gave its final approval to a 17.5 billion euro fund that will help the most coal-dependent European Union regions shift to a climate-neutral economy.
Commercial Observer: Sometimes (not always, they mix it up) if you enter the letters “esg” into Google, the first thing you will get is the ESG ratings and rankings of Standard & Poors Global, one of the key rating agencies judging the credit of companies worldwide.
Cision: The securities regulatory authorities in Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Québec and Saskatchewan (the participating jurisdictions) today published the underlying data used to prepare the sixth year review of women on boards and in executive officer positions.
Investing: A rush by companies to boost their sustainability claims has reached foreign exchange markets in the form of currency hedging products where the cost is tied to a firm's environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.
The Asset: While the focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing has been gathering momentum in recent years, 2020 saw the dialogue pivot from interest to allocations, with substantial inflows into a range of ESG products.
BNN Bloomberg: Central banks are increasingly interested in environmentally sound and socially responsible investment, with 43% of respondents to the HSBC Reserve Management Trends survey for 2021 saying they’d bought green bonds.
Yahoo Finance: The pressure is on for boards to diversify, and it’s working. Since last June, 145 S&P 500 companies have added at least one Black director, a “brisk” pace compared to past years, according to recruiter Russell Reynolds Associates. Latino board appointments at public companies quadrupled from a year ago, and women, for the first time, hold almost a third of all seats on the S&P 500. Only one major U.S. initial public offering debuted with an all-male board last year.
BNN Bloomberg: Executives from Citadel Securities LLC and KKR & Co. are throwing their weight behind a new group that aims to combat anti-Asian hate after a surge in violent attacks.
World Positive: This is a common question that comes our way — from venture firms, limited partners, academics, and the media — and the answer is, well, not so obvious despite a craving for simplicity.
Institutional Asset Manager: Fourteen institutional investment consulting firms in the US, with worldwide assets under advisement totalling more than USD33 trillion, have established the Investment Consultants Sustainability Working Group – US (ICSWG-US), with the aim of promoting and improve sustainable investment practices across the investment industry.
The Guardian: A loophole in HSBC’s pledge to phase out financing for coal by 2040 will allow the bank to support companies with plans to build more than 70 new coal plants, which could cause an estimated 18,700 deaths from air pollution a year, according to a report.
BNN Bloomberg: Activists seeking to end secret hearings for harassment complaints against banks claimed a victory of sorts last month when they got almost half of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. shareholders to back their proposal.
Institutional Asset Manager: Asset management firms have been accused of overlooking the wellbeing of their employees as a recent survey from Howden reveals that most firms have no strategy in place for addressing issues including mental health and work/life balance.
Funds Europe: Robert Murphy, managing director at Edison Group, considers the UK’s financial policy post-Brexit now that London is under scrutiny - and says that creating an ESG hub might give the UK a better chance to assert itself as an investment powerhouse.
Yahoo News: Carlyle Group Inc. is the latest company to tie compensation of its chief executive officer to the firm’s performance on certain diversity and inclusion goals as corporate America tries to make good on promises to boost underrepresented talent.
Wealth Professional: Full-service wealth management firms that want to maintain their business today and ensure its growth tomorrow must be unequivocal about their commitment to ESG investing, according to a new survey from J.D. Power.
BNN Bloomberg: In the run up to the 2020 U.S. election, a meme started making the rounds on Twitter. “Transport is climate policy,” someone would tweet above an article about subway improvement. “Childcare is climate policy,” they’d say about a paid maternity leave proposal. The quip applied to almost everything—even voting by mail.
Institutional Investor: For women in the financial services industry, the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the challenges they face in their jobs, resulting in a significant exodus from the field.
Institutional Asset Manager: In a major vote of confidence in London’s overall attractiveness as a top investment destination, a poll of global institutional investors shows that the city is leading the world in acceleration and adoption of the ESG agenda.
Yahoo News: CarVal Investors, a global alternative investment manager, lined up $490 million in commitments for a clean energy fund as investors flock to the fast-growing renewables space.
Institutional Asset Manager: Sustainability as an investment theme looks set to be a permanent feature of the asset management landscape. One sustainable asset class that is gaining increasing prominence is ‘green bonds’, or bonds in which the proceeds must be spent on projects that support the environment. But how keen are investors to “greenify” their portfolios?
Yahoo Finance: BlackRock Inc. disclosed that over the first three months of the year, it voted for a majority of shareholder proposals advocating sustainability-related changes at the companies whose shares it holds. But with key votes looming at major polluters, including oil heavyweight Exxon Mobil Corp., activists say that the firm’s true climate commitments haven’t yet been tested.
Institutional Asset Manager: In a new research paper, "Honey, I Shrunk the ESG Alpha": Risk-Adjusting ESG Portfolio Returns, Scientific Beta researchers examine equity strategies that exploit information in ESG ratings, following several papers that suggest that these strategies lead to outperformance.
Nasdaq: Blackstone Group Inc BX.N has for the first time asked executives in companies controlled by its private equity arm to regularly report on environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters to their boards, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
CNBC: Sustainability-focused funds attracted record inflows during the first quarter, pushing global assets under management in ESG funds to nearly $2 trillion, according to a report from Morningstar released.
Institutional Investor: Who the president is matters to sustainable investing. One hundred days into Joe Biden’s presidency, his administration’s executive orders and agency actions have reinstated and advanced an environment that empowers sustainable investing.
Institutional Investor: As allocators and fund managers alike scramble to incorporate diversity and climate change into their strategies, one of Canada’s largest asset owners has released its latest report on how, exactly, a C$365.5 billion pension fund does it.
BNN Bloomberg: Initial calls for racial audits at Wall Street banks and other corporations were rejected by shareholders, but support was high enough that companies are likely to face increased pressure to agree to future reviews.
Hedge Week: Hedge funds are falling behind other sectors such as private equity and real estate when it comes to integrating ESG factors into their portfolios.
Business Wire: Blackstone announced that it is continuing to expand its Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) team, with five newly created senior positions across the U.S., Europe and Asia.
Zawya: Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, is researching how to incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in its indexed equity investments, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Institutional Investor: Proponents of ESG argue that there are not just moral benefits to investing according to environmental, social and governance goals: ESG funds also outperform their peers.
Castle Hall helps investors build comprehensive due diligence programs across hedge fund, private equity and long only portfolios More →
Montreal
1080 Côte du Beaver Hall, Suite 904
Montreal, QC
Canada, H2Z 1S8
+1-450-465-8880
Halifax
84 Chain Lake Drive, Suite 501
Halifax, NS
Canada, B3S 1A2
+1-902-429-8880
London
1 Pancras Square, Kings Cross
Gridiron Building
London, N1C 4AG
United Kingdom
+44 20 3036 0828
Prague
Pujmanové 1753/10a,
140 00 Praha 4.
Czech Republic
Manila
Ground Floor, Three E-com Center
Mall of Asia Complex
Pasay City, Metro Manila
Philippines 1300
Abu Dhabi
Floor No.15 Al Sarab Tower,
Adgm Square,
Al Maryah Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Tel: +971 (2) 694 8510
Sydney
Level 36 Governor Phillip Tower
1 Farrer Place Sydney 2000
Australia
+61 (2) 8823 3370
Copyright © 2021 Entreprise Castle Hall Alternatives, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Terms of Service and Privacy Policy