In the 1990s, we were one of the first to see the potential of including sustainability. Today’s investor, too, seeks outcomes beyond their financial goals alone. Societal benefits, like fair employment practices and environmental accountability, are just as essential to them.

To serve wealth and well-being, we need to understand the financial materiality of ESG factors and actively engage with companies to improve ESG scores.

To do this, we operate jointly with our sustainability affiliate RobecoSAM; the leading experts since their launch in the 90s. Their research is the sustainable ingredient in everything we do, and it’s a successful one: in 2020, Robeco and RobecoSAM were again awarded the highest possible A+ sustainability scores by the Principles for Responsible Investment (source: PRI).

The one thing we cannot do is nothing. Our Sustainability Inside approach, which uses ESG building blocks, is applied to the majority of our strategies. As of March 2020, we have more than 131 billion EUR assets integrating ESG. We tailor our solutions to individual risk budgets and SI needs, while ensuring ESG information is consistently integrated into our investment processes.

With an extensive range of impact investing products, we also cater to investors with explicit ESG targets, like environmental footprint reduction, investors who wish to contribute to the SDGs, or invest in themes, like water or gender equality.

A team of engagement specialists maintains an active dialogue with 200 companies to influence corporate behavior. They also vote at around 5,000 shareholder meetings, creating real change. For example, following our engagement, Shell agreed to set short-term targets for cutting carbon emissions, and will link executive pay to meeting these objectives for the first time. We endorse numerous codes of conduct and principles. Robeco is a PRI signatory, a participant in the UNGC and the ICGN. We have also signed the Dutch SDG Investing Agenda and several local stewardship codes. 

You can embark on sustainability investing in small steps. What we see at Robeco is that, as knowledge of and experience in SI increase across the organization, so does conviction. Nothing is impossible.