ESG: How an Asset Management Company can - and must! - Understand your Challenges

Designing an Efficient Organisation to Chart the Course

In a world facing enormous challenges, private actors also have a responsibility to bear, particularly to finance projects that contribute to the protection of ecosystems, natural resources and/or the energy transition. To this end, everything starts from a vision, a strategy, a direction. In concrete terms, it is highly desirable for asset management companies to establish a governance model that can effectively reflect sustainability convictions in investment strategies.

To achieve this, organisations must equip themselves with all the necessary human and organisational resources to structure, manage and plan their sustainability strategy at entity level. And by having as a basis a comitology that extends from the Board of Directors to operational functions. At SWEN Capital Partners, a subsidiary of OFI Invest and Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, the ESG strategy and its deployment are discussed at the Board of Directors and Executive Committee level, but also at a more operational level by involving the heads of all functions in a Sustainable Finance Steering Committee.

Far from being a white elephant, this organisation, which covers each “floor” of the asset management company, is a vector of indispensable synergies and, ultimately, lays the foundations for participatory governance that can engage all employees on the same path.

Offering Innovative Products to Institutional Investors

SWEN Capital Partners became a Société à mission (mission-driven company) in 2023 and is firmly committed to a new ambition. While essential, this step was neither a start nor an end for the company, but rather both at the same time. It has, in a way, enshrined the values and convictions it has held since its creation, namely, to promote economic models that are sustainable in both environmental and social terms, in other words to invest in nature.

Ten years after its creation, the company is determined to continue on this path, making it a point of honour to offer innovative products that aim to meet humanity’s essential needs within planetary boundaries, convinced that companies that anticipate future changes and accept to transform themselves will be the leaders of tomorrow.

Current headwinds, marked by a decline in regulatory ambitions for ESG and a questioning of international ecosystem protection targets, are testing sustainability commitments and strategies. Whatever the motivations, these challenges are coming up against unavoidable physical realities, such as climate change and the collapse of biodiversity, which are already impacting the activities financed. And tomorrow, those economic consequences will be even more pronounced.

The sustainability momentum, driven in recent years by many asset management companies, must continue. Not only to protect the value of the assets financed, but above all to create value. These companies, having invested massively in tools, in human resources and reorganised their structures, are best placed to address the environmental and social challenges facing our industry, whatever the context.

These asset management companies now embody their convictions and commitments through innovative investment products, combining financial performance and sustainability. They show a clear will to transform business models and support companies in creating sustainable value. This is notably the case for the SWEN Blue Ocean thematic impact fund, launched in 2021 in scientific partnership with Ifremer. Specialising in venture capital and recognised as a “Top Innovation Fund” by UpLink as well as the World Economic Forum, it funds start-ups that develop technological solutions to stem the three major long-standing threats to the oceans: overexploitation of species, pollution and climate change.

Another example is the Macif Terre & Vivant fund, also designed by SWEN Capital Partners, which is committed to preserving, protecting and restoring life.

Developing Key Expertise and Encouraging Data Sharing

These two products are the direct result of specialised expertise and methodologies that the asset management company has developed in close collaboration with a wide range of partners (scientists, industrialists, etc.), the aim again being to invest in activities that mitigate anthropogenic impacts on ecosystems.

Following this rationale of financing meaningful projects whose relevance is proven by the figures, in 2022 SWEN Capital Partners became a co-shareholder of the NEC (Net Environmental Contribution) Initiative, an indicator that measures economic activities’ level of contribution to the ecological transition by assigning a score on a scale of-100% to +100%.

Lastly, the asset management company is committed to sharing in order to continue driving forward all the players in the financial ecosystem. This is reflected in the 1000 Ocean Startups initiative, which was co-founded in 2021 alongside other players such as Ocean Hub Africa, Katapult Ocean and Conservation International Ventures.

Just as laudable, its goal is to enable the development of 1,000 disruptive startups to restore ocean health by the end of the decade.

Renaud Serre-Lapergue, Sustainable Finance Strategy Director, SWEN Capital Partners