2023, ‘ESG-ise’ your Assets

The past 12 months have been truly exciting and structurally impactful to the design and investment focus of a majority of UCITS and a considerable portion of AIFs. At the same time, MiFID firms have revised their product and service offering to take into account the sustainability preferences of their clients.

This change in investment focus driven by the politically inflicted  development in distribution patterns in the EU marked the beginning of the journey towards ESG and sustainability criteria becoming part of the mainstream and core to any investment decision taken.

2023 will continue to impact us as an industry as well as the market participants. Asset and wealth managers, as well as distributors, have to align themselves with the new sustainability governance requirements. These guidelines that came into effect in summer 2022 link the product change to the organisations, both at the level of the AIFM or Management Company as well as at the level of the Portfolio Manager and distribution delegates. These requirements are completed by comprehensive reporting duties, starting with the Principal adverse impact (PAI), an enhanced AIFM and MiFID reporting, right up to the new reporting duties focused on Taxonomy and corporate sustainability metrics.

The challenge for the year to come is to embark on this organisational transformation in order to ‘energise’ or as we state in this year’s motto ‘ESG-ise‘ your organisation. Such transformation is essential to unleash the full potential of the ESG change and take advantage of the new opportunities, both in terms of assets and more importantly investor storytelling.

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