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UBS has made important contributions to the development of impact investing over the last 12 months – one of the reasons for the bank’s Achievement in CSR award.
In 2014 the bank was involved in the G8 Taskforce report on social impact investment, which calls on global governments to modernise their fiduciary duty concepts and on trustees to take account of impact investing.
The group is also part of the World Economic Forum’s Mainstreaming Impact Investing initiative, which promotes this way of investing globally and engages in research.
Christian Leitz, head of corporate responsibility management at UBS, is enthusiastic about the prospects.
“Impact investing is still at the beginning of its evolution. These major organisations [G8 Taskforce and WEF] are trying to make sense of it and get a grip on the term, which is good. At present it’s still a small area of finance globally, but, according to the G8 report, it has the potential of unleashing up to $1 trillion of new investment in the near future.”
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UBS and Society is an important development for us, with all business divisions involved Christian Leitz, UBS |
To UBS, sustainability in banking means both seizing opportunities and managing risk. As the bank’s sustainable offering grows, the focus is shifting from ‘doing no harm’ to ‘doing good’, and that means aligning client and supplier relationships with the strict environmental and social risk management standards in place at the bank.
A clear indication of the emphasis the bank is putting on maintaining these standards is the 2014 launch of UBS and Society. This is an umbrella platform designed to harness the firm’s global capabilities and activities in sustainable investing and philanthropy, its environmental and social programmes and community interaction, and apply the same standards across all divisions.
“UBS and Society is an important development for us,” says Leitz. “It’s a cross-business initiative, with all business divisions involved. In the key area of sustainable investing and philanthropy there may be a focus on wealth management and the private-client space at the moment, but overall we are rolling this out across all our business divisions – global asset management, retail and corporate and our investment bank also.”
Clients are at the heart of the conversations as part of UBS and Society.
“Whether it’s ESG integration or exclusion, impact investing or pure philanthropy, we aim to help clients with whatever they want to achieve,” says Leitz.
