Stockholm (NordSIP) – Allianz Global Investors, announced that Gerold Koch has joined AllianzGI’s risklab unit to lead a new team that will advise clients on all aspects of ESG and sustainable investing. Within AllianzGI, risklab specialises in sophisticated advisory capabilities and solutions for institutional investors.
Gerold Koch joins AllianzGI from DWS, where he was most recently Head of ESG Investment Specialists, Americas. Koch worked for 15 years with DWS in Germany and the US, advising clients on ESG and sustainability topics and customizing ESG products for clients.
“With sustainability continuing to grow in importance for investors and a cornerstone of AllianzGI’s strategy to unlock further business growth, we are pleased to announce the creation of a new, dedicated team within risklab that will provide holistic portfolio advice to clients around all aspects of ESG and sustainable investing,” Tim Friederich, Head of risklab, says.
The new team will help clients to design investment strategies for their portfolios that fulfil both their aspirations for sustainability as well as helping them meet their investment goals. It will apply and further develop risklab’s quantitative distinctive analytics framework to incorporate sustainability in the portfolio optimisation and construction processes. In that sense, Koch’s team will work closely with and complement Matt Christensen’s Sustainable & Impact Investing team.
NordSIP last spoke to Koch to discuss his views on how to best evaluate climate risk and what it means for portfolio composition. On that occasion, he distinguished between transition and physical climate risk. “Not many investors have the tools to look at the physical impact. We identified a data provider that looks at physical risk and evaluates it, and we worked with an environmental consultant, California-based firm Four Twenty Seven. For example, they engaged with pharmaceutical companies and mapped where their production and distribution facilities were located around the globe, and then overlaid climate models to see which ones were at risk. If one of them is located in a coastal plain, it is at higher risk of being flooded, which means the company should consider shifting production or even moving to another country,” Koch explained on that occasion.
Gerold will move office from New York to Munich, where his team will be based.
