Exchanging ideas about Responsible Investments

I was recently invited to speak at the ESG Asia conference in Singapore. The conference was registered out by more than a hundred participants and sponsored by the big players within the investment mainstream, Singapore Stock Exchange, CNBC among the asset managers and service providers.

The message is loud and clear. While the Asian investors have some catching up to do in formalizing their responsible investment practices, the total number of the sizable players has reached a critical mass. Within the upcoming years, we will see a wave of PRI signatories coming from Asia. This will be driven partially by regulatory initiatives and so on, but more importantly for us Europeans, the investment managers and asset owners in Asia will come up with innovative approaches to responsible investments that we have not yet envisioned.

This upcoming wave of innovation is natural considering the diversity of asset owners within the region. They operate in very distinctive legal and regulatory environment, but also from a very different cultural context. Their unique forms require distinctive responsible investment strategies. We welcome this development. Responsible Investment is still a young industry and we need all hands on deck to figure out how to keep incorporating environmental, social and governance issues in to investment processes.

While we are glad to share our experiences from our long journey within responsible investments in industry conferences, we are also very attentive to understand the specific needs of those clients as well as the solutions the local investment managers create to cater those local needs. This helps us to provide the “best of all worlds” for all Nordea clients.