Stockholm (NordSIP) – The beginning of the year has seen more institutional investors on the lookout for sustainable products. Hopefully, asset managers will be there to meet the demand. Two such requests for proposals on the Global Fund Search platform might already have caught the attention of eager managers. As both are about to expire next week, it is now high time to submit proposals.
One of the searches in question, initiated by a German/Austrian fund-of-funds manager, might sound like a plain-vanilla mandate. The investor is looking to allocate EUR 30 million to a core, long-only, large-cap listed global equity strategy. Both quantitative and fundamental strategies are eligible, and the candidates will be benchmarked against MSCI World Index. There is a twist, however. The fund needs to be classified under Article 8 or 9 of the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regime (SFDR). The potential manager is also required to be a UN PRI signatory.
Note that the investor is not interested in seeding a new product. The requirement is that the potential manager has an existing UCITS fund with a minimum of EUR 100 million in assets under management and at least three years of track record at fund level.
Another quite different search on the GFS platform is courtesy of The Hempel Foundation. This mandate is about direct impact investments, and liquid assets like stocks and bonds are not of interest. The newly established Danish impact investment initiative is looking to invest in strategies that share a similar impact focus and a credible investment hypothesis for creating lasting change within its prospective portfolio on behalf of SDG 15 (Life on land). With an initial allocation of USD 10 million, the foundation will target impact funds that contribute to improving the trajectory of biodiversity on land and, in particular, the preservation and sustainable management of tropical forests.
Apart from protecting tropical forests, among the primary impact goals enlisted in the search are biodiversity protection on land and climate mitigation and adaptation strategies on land that support biodiversity, including the generation of carbon credits and supporting infrastructure and technologies.
According to the request for proposal, while the investment should generate a positive financial return, it “may potentially be lower than the market would normally offer for a similar investment”. Importantly, however, it is a prerequisite that the proposed investment has a measurable impact on SDG 15.
Let us hope that these investors find suitable matches for their sustainability ambitions.
