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    JP Morgan Announces US$200 Billion in Sustainable Financing

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    Stockholm (NordSIP) – During its investor day at the end of February, JP Morgan announced it would integrate ESG into all of its asset management portfolio. The investment manager also announced it would launch new ESG-focused strategies.

    The decision by the investment bank comes on the heels of a similar decision by BlackRock to integrate ESG into all of its investment decisions, begin excluding problematic sectors and improve disclosures. Nevertheless, according to Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, this year’s decisions are not the result of that announcement. “We take ESG seriously. We’re not doing this to respond to the short-term or the long-term. We think it’s the right thing to do. We want to be a measured voice, a mature voice in solving society’s problems.”

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    “I think it’s a risk management problem for society and we should acknowledge the problem and start working on it,” the CEO said. “We’ve got demands from virtually every central bank about stress testing and sustainability, and you’re going to have (…) Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, Sustainalytics and Just Capital all valuing companies on all these various things.”

    Discussing the relevance of  sustainability, Daniel E. Pinto, Co-President and Co-COO of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and CEO of Corporate & Investment Bank, noted that “there is no meeting that any of us go around the world where this issue is not coming up(…), particularly, in the last two years [it] has accelerated a lot.”

    “Going forward, we’ll articulate our efforts across three areas of focus, and we’ll measure progress in a way that’s consistent with the UN standards,” Jennifer A. Piepszak, Chief Financial Officer, JPMorgan Chase & Co. “The three areas are green initiative: supporting climate action, clean water and waste management; social, which is increasing access to housing, education and healthcare; and economic development, which is about advancing infrastructure, innovation and growth. To hold ourselves accountable, we’re going to expand beyond our original green financing target to a new one that reflects these broader goals. This year alone our goal is to do at least $200 billion in financing toward these objectives. And we’re going to look for ways to grow this number over time. And as a point of comparison, in 2019, we did more than $175 billion in financing under this framework, and that included $50 billion of green financing. As part of this, we became a member of the Climate Leadership Council because we believe that we need policy solutions to help address climate change.”

    Image by Dudek1337 via Wikimedia Commons

    Filipe Albuquerque
    Filipe Albuquerque
    Filipe is an economist with 8 years of experience in macroeconomic and financial analysis for the Economist Intelligence Unit, the UN World Institute for Development Economic Research, the Stockholm School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Filipe holds a MSc in European Political Economy from the LSE and a MSc in Economics from the University of London, where he currently is a PhD candidate.

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