As one of the founding partners of the Sustainable Developments Investments Asset Owner Platform (SDI AOP), BCI, is a firm believer in embedding the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their investment process.
We have asked Jennifer Coulson, vice president ESG at BCI and one of the founding members of the SDI AOP, why the SDI data is important to her organization and who’s using the data.
Why is SDI data so important to BCI?
BCI and other institutional investors increasingly consider the UN Sustainable Development Goals as relevant to our investment strategies, asset allocations, investment decisions, and active ownership. A lack of quality, standardized data continues to make it challenging to identify company-level contributions to the SDGs and it is also important that we don’t have multiple standards of reporting in terms of alignment with the SDGs That’s where the SDI-AOP plays such an important role. By having a global standard that asset owners really buy into will speed up adoption, and the standard and the data can also be used by corporate to better illustrate how exactly their businesses contribute to the SDGs with verifiable data.
How does your organization use SDI AOP data?
Right now, BCI uses the SDI-AOP data to measure our exposure to the UN SDGs at a total fund level across all asset classes. However, we also use it from the bottom up as a data point that helps inform our ESG integration in actively managed equity portfolios and in fixed income. BCI is also looking to begin applying the SDI-AOP data to externally managed portfolios over time.
What is the most relevant portion of the SDI AOP data for your organization?
It is difficult at this point to single out just one portion of the data that is particularly relevant to BCI. Instead, for the most part, we use the defining thresholds that indicate whether a company is decisive or majority aligned to the SDGs. The objective, quantitative methodology underlying these conclusions are appealing to investors like ourselves.
Within in your organization, who uses the data?
The SDI-AOP data is still relatively new to BCI so we are really at the beginning of our journey. Right now, the data is used primarily by our public markets and investment strategy & risk teams. For example, we are building dashboards that investment teams can use to identify opportunities in their universe.