SUSTAINABILITY
INVESTING MORE RESPONSIBLY
Product scopeextension
WORLD
Combining financial and extra-financial performance for more sustainable asset management
The extra-financial performance of investments is strictly regulated and reflects growing demand among clients(1) 75% of French savers believe that the environmental impact of investments is an important issue.Source: OpinionWay in the French Financial Market Regulator, AMF, July 2023., making it an increasingly important factor in the investment strategy of both savers and investment managers. Sustainable investing is thriving, spurred both by clients who seek meaningful investments, as well as by distribution partners, who want to diversify their investment offerings. But what does managing savings more sustainabily exactly means? Bertrand Bussière, BNP Paribas Cardif Sustainable Investment Coordinator and Alice Mignon, Head of Impact transformation at BNP Paribas Cardif, share insights.
Alice Mignon Head of Impact transformation at BNP Paribas Cardif
Bertrand Bussière, BNP Paribas Cardif Sustainable Investment Coordinator
“We continually seek to create value for our partners and for their clients. Offering responsible investment options is an important factor in respecting our mandate to protect the savings of our policyholders over the long term,”
How would you qualify BNP Paribas Cardif’s responsible investing policy?
Bertrand Bussière: Our approach as a responsible investor is based on a proven methodology that has been applied for around 15 years at BNP Paribas Cardif. This progressive approach is now extremely robust, integrating regulatory changes as they are introduced. We carefully select investments based on how they measure up against responsibility criteria, and different exclusions are applied in stages to narrow the investment range available to our asset managers.
How do you integrate ESG (environmental, social and governance) criteria into the asset management process, and what impact does this have on financial performance?
Bertrand Bussière: Integrating these criteria is one of the most important steps in the process we apply to reduce the number of correponding investments. We analyse this data and then exclude companies or countries that have not attained a sufficient score in our view. This leads to the elimination of about a third of the assets during one or the other of our different screening stages. The direct link between ESG criteria and financial performance is difficult to establish for a short-term horizon, but placing priority on investments with the best ESG scores most certainly reduces long-term risks. And this improves their performance, since they will show better resilience in the face of both climate and social changes. The cornerstone of our business as a long-term investor is to generate yield for our policyholders while mitigating risks.
How do you define the notion of positive impact investments? And how does this inform BNP Paribas Cardif’s investment strategy?
Bertrand Bussière: At the end of the selection process for investments, we qualify some of them as having positive impact. They must therefore meet several criteria, in particular the intention to generate a positive impact. This intention must be quantifiable and measurable using indicators.