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    UBP Launches New Impact EM Fund

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    Stockholm (NordSIP) –  Union Bancaire Privée (UBP) has announced the launch of the UBAM – Positive Impact Emerging Equity fund. The fund will complement the existing impact equity strategy, UBAM – Positive Impact Equity, launched in September 2018.

    The new fund will invest in 35–45 high-conviction listed companies with strong growth potential in emerging markets that can make a measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. The portfolio’s stocks are selected from among six themes mapped to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): basic needs, health and well-being, inclusive and fair economies, healthy ecosystems, climate stability and sustainable communities. Initial investments will include companies involved in renewable energy and energy storage, transport disruption, life/health insurance innovation and microfinance.

    - Partner Message -

    Two analysts and a consultant will support fund co-managers Mathieu Nègre (Head of Emerging Equities) and Eli Koen (Emerging Equities Portfolio Manager). When selecting stocks, the team will use UBP’s proprietary ‘IMAP’ scoring methodology, which judges the impact intensity of each stock and assigns it a score out of 20; a score of 12 is the minimum threshold for acceptance into the portfolio and watchlist.

    Impact Governance

    Concomitantly, UBP has also formalised its governance arrangements in the area of impact investment by setting up two dedicated entities: the Impact Advisory Board and the Impact Investment Committee.

    The Impact Advisory Board will tap external experts from outside the investment management industry to provide UBP’s impact platform with thought leadership. The advisory board is chaired by UBP’s Board member Anne Rotman de Picciotto. The external sustainability experts are Jake Reynolds, Executive Director of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL); Kanini Mutooni, MD of EMEA for Toniic, the global action network for impact investors; and Tony Juniper, Chair of Natural England, the UK government’s official nature conservation agency.

    The Impact Investment Committee is responsible for developing UNP’s impact investing capabilities, while also incorporating industry best practice. It is chaired by Simon Pickard and includes Victoria Leggett (Head of Impact Investing), Rupert Welchman (Impact Portfolio Manager), Karine Jesiolowski (Head of Responsible Investment, Asset Management) and Didier Chan-Voc-Chun (Head of Multi-Management and Fund Research).

    Image by David Mark from Pixabay

    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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