Supporting diverse approaches
You may want to influence companies, to integrate ESG issues into investment models or to create screened portfolios. Each approach offers different benefits and needs different research support.
Meeting your particular objectives
The diversity of approaches arises as people measure corporate responsibility for ever wider uses within asset management. What works for one product may not work at all when applied to the firm's total assets. Stakeholder expectations of heightened responsibility and the multiple strategies and asset classes handled by a typical asset manager all require their own approaches.
Looking for value and change
So you may focus on the search for value in corporate responsibility, evaluating risks and opportunities on behalf of all your clients. Or you may seek to build an engagement strategy to support your governance work or to meet stakeholder expectations. Here the focus will be upon the choice of issues and companies to engage with, which approaches work best, and how to communicate what you are doing.
Client loyalty and multiple strategies
You may be creating products that build strong loyalty with particular client groups or seeking to reinforce a strong corporate responsibility brand. Here screened portfolios are likely to be relevant.
But for an increasing number of asset managers the challenge is how to combine a number of these approaches to best effect.
The EIRIS role
Our research has developed alongside and driven these developments. So some of our corporate responsibility criteria are particularly suited to screened portfolios. Others (for example the Convention Watch service) fit particularly well with detailed engagement on an issue already in the media. And over the last ten years, most of the new areas of research we have launched start with a risk assessment and then look at how companies are managing that risk through their policies, systems and reporting.
In the last year, we have developed toolkits to help investors tackle Climate Change and implement the PRI principles. Taken together with our EPM software and the experience of our client team we believe these place us in a strong position to support each client in finding the best combination of strategies to meet their needs.
