Responsible Investor

RI round-up May 23

RI’s bite-sized round-up of the week’s main responsible investment news.

JPMorgan Investor Services, the global custodian, has launched a service to alert institutional clients when their investment portfolios have breached limits they have set on environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. The alerts, which can be set up as web-based reports, are incorporated in JP Morgan’s Compliance Reporting Services. The research, taken from reviews of company filings, corporate websites, policy statements, and CSR reports, covers about 50 categories, including adult entertainment, gambling, tobacco, weapons, country ties, board diversity, corporate governance, climate change and faith values. JP Morgan is sourcing the screening data from Institutional Shareholders Services (ISS), part of the RiskMetrics Group. Rajesh Kumar, executive director for compliance reporting services, JPMorgan Investor Services, said: “We have partnered with leading institutional and asset manager clients to further advance our investment compliance reporting application to support the growing interest in socially responsible investing.”
Eurofer, the €300m defined contribution pension plan for Italian railway and transport workers, which has stipulated responsible investment guidelines for its investment managers since it started in 2004, is reportedly tendering new mandates in equities and bonds. Riccardo Cesari, chief investment officer at the fund, told European Pensions & Investment News that the new mandates would comprise a new investment option for

its 44,000 members. The new investment option will be split between 50% equities and 50% bonds. The fund’s two current DC options both invest heavily in bonds. Cesari said the fund was also considering investments in real estate and private equity.
PensionDanmark, the DKr70.4bn (9.4bn) Danish pension fund, is seeking to hire a custodian or corporate governance agency to handle voting on its listed equity investments. A spokesman for the fund said: “We are having conversations with a few providers in order to expand our own knowledge of the area before we sign up to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment later this year. We want to esnure that we can meet UNPRI governance requirements before we sign.”
The UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) is reportedly preparing to create a version in Portuguese of its six principles for investor action in recognition of take-up amongst Brazilian investors. In Brazil, 22 institutions, mostly pension funds including Centrus, Funcef, Sistel, Petros and Valia, have signed up to the PRI, making it one of the biggest emerging markets countries for PRI interest.
Seperately, the PRI has also met with around 40 private equity firms and investors at a meeting in New York with the aim of signing up more private equity firms. Only two private equity companies –Doughty Hanson and Pantheon Ventures – have so far signed the PRI, out of a total of 360 signatories.

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