“Unlike climate change, there is no Paris Agreement for inequality. In this roadmap, we explain how inequality underpins and reinforces social risks, and how it threatens stability, growth, and long-term investment."- Sindhu D Janakiram, ESG Analyst and Equality Lead at BNP Paribas Asset Management
This roadmap offers a framework to help investors identify corporate activities that can exacerbate inequality and describe how BNP Paribas Asset Management takes action to address inequality.The strategy outlines how the equality framework is used to generate investment ideas, construct portfolios, control for risk, and engage with companies and markets across the six ‘pillars’.As the leading provider of social data within diversity, human rights, health and safety, and labor rights, Denominator is especially thrilled see BNP Paribas Asset Management’s commitment to integrating data to assess companies' performance and risks, focusing on social indicators that measure inequality, as outlined in pillar #3
The 6 pillars
1. Forward-looking perspective: We look at how companies are preparing for a just transition, and how they are promoting gender equality
2. Responsible business conduct: We avoid investing in companies that do not respect human rights, labour standards and anti-corruption principles
3. ESG integration: We use environmental, social and governance data to assess companies' performance and risks, focusing on social indicators that measure inequality
4. Stewardship: We use voting, engagement and public policy advocacy to motivate companies to improve their equality practices and support shareholder proposals that address inequality
5. Sustainability in our product range: We offer investors products that align with our equality theme such as funds that invest in social bonds or inclusive growth
6. Sustainability in our operations: We ‘walk the talk’ on inequality and promote diversity and inclusion, fair wages, and employee well-being; we encourage staff to partner with organisations that, for example, seek to improve access to power and water, or take on youth unemployment". As an asset manager, we seek to deliver sustainable long-term returns. By ‘sustainable’, we mean both returns that can be sustained over the long term and returns that are in balance with society and the environment. These two meanings of sustainable are inseparable – we cannot deliver long-term returns without helping to achieve the energy transition, healthy ecosystems, and greater equality in our societies.
Moreover, this development of asset managers increasingly taking social considerations into account is simultaneously supported by a new quantitative analysis by Morningstar looking at the “Voice of Asset Owners”, showing an extensive growth in such considerations.
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