Sustainable investment goes to school

The Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights and Columbia University’s Earth Institute will run a series of high-level courses on sustainable investment focused on environmental, social and governance approaches as well as human and labour rights this autumn. The Compass Sustainable Investing Certificate program, designed for long-term investors, will have a solutions-driven … Read more

End of the beginning for responsible investment

Recent reflections on this month’s five-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse have focused on a variety of developments since the crisis: from reform to remuneration, sovereign debt to shadow banking, and from offshore tax to the Occupy movement. However, one significant area that has been largely overlooked has been the rise of sustainable and … Read more

Europe, alternatives pay for Danish Sampension

The herd mentality of investors has been agonised over for as long as markets have been around. The dilemma is often raised of whether to participate in or shun market trends, but the DKK150-billion ($27-billion) Sampension has succeeded recently with a selective approach. It has fully embraced the institutional diversification movement by building a significant … Read more

Giving time to investment governance

Roger Urwin, global head of content at Towers Watson and governance specialist, says most organisations don’t spend enough time on it, but transformational change is all about giving time to investment governance. Culture and leadership, for example is so self-evidently important in people organisations and yet it is understated in asset owners, he says. “The soft … Read more

NEST into infrastructure and property

The National Employment Savings Trust, NEST, the UK government-backed pension scheme set up a year ago with the introduction of auto-enrolment, developed a new allocation to real estate this summer. Now it is planning to add infrastructure to its illiquid allocations in a move reflective of a change of thinking to embrace more risk. NEST’s … Read more

Towers Watson: complexity coming straight at you

To be a long-term investor requires thematic investing because markets and economies are complex adaptive systems, according to Tim Hodgson, global head of the thinking-ahead group at Towers Watson. Hodgson told delegates at the Towers Watson Ideas Exchange in Sydney that economies and markets are complex and adaptive, their path is not random and the … Read more