Investing for impact

Every company in our portfolio is selected on a guiding principle: a company's products that make the world healthier, safer or greener should deliver long-term returns.

The funds invest across nine themes: four social (Education, Health, Safety and Wellbeing) and five environmental (Cleaner Energy, Environmental Services, Resource Efficiency, Water Management and Sustainable Transport).

Thematic focus alone does not make a good investment. The funds combine a top-down thematic framework with rigorous bottom-up analysis of individual companies, assessing both what a company does and how it operates.

What a company does: a bespoke Impact Engine assesses the intensity of the positive impact generated by a company's products and services.

How a company operates: Fundamental Quality Analysis examines environmental, social and governance factors alongside strategic, business model and financial analysis.

The result is a portfolio where impact and investment quality are both explicitly tested, not assumed.

Greenwashing is easy to claim and hard to disprove. The answer is transparency: publishing what the funds invest in, why and what impact those investments generate. Our bespoke impact calculator illustrates the positive impact associated with a given amount of money invested in each strategy.

Annual impact reports set out the measurable environmental and social outcomes associated with the portfolio. The funds also engage with regulators, policymakers and standard setters to support the development of robust standards for impact investing across the industry.

Owning a stake in a company carries responsibility. The funds hold portfolio companies for four to seven years on average, a time horizon that reflects genuine ownership rather than short-term trading.

That long-term perspective supports active engagement with company management on environmental, social and governance issues, as well as voting at AGMs. Well-managed companies that consider the interests of their stakeholders are, simply, better investments.

We’re passionate about nine critical social and environmental problems confronting society.

Around 430 companies globally provide credible solutions to the sustainability challenges the funds focus on. From that universe, the investment team selects a concentrated portfolio of the companies best placed to deliver competitive returns by doing so.