Sarasin IE Diversified Endowments
A complete investment solution for charities, aiming to produce a reasonable level of income while ensuring that the ‘real’ value of the capital is maintained.
About This Fund
The Sarasin IE Diversified Endowments Fund is aimed at long-term charity investors with liabilities within the euro area.
It provides a flow of income for today’s beneficiaries, while maintaining the ‘real’ value of the capital and income for future generations.
Our integrated ESG screening criteria ensures that stewardship is fully embedded in portfolio construction, and aids risk management.
Key Benefits
The strategy provides charities with a sustainable income. We manage the portfolio on a total return basis, picking stocks on merit, rather than maintaining a constant bias to higher yielding securities.
In short, the strategy is a modern, efficient and cost-effective way of wrapping a charity’s investments into a bespoke mix of assets with wide diversification and attractive overall costs.
How we invest for this fund
We invest globally in a combination of assets. These can include equities, government or corporate bonds, property, cash and alternatives.
It is not constrained by geography, sector or style. The team occasionally uses derivatives to reduce risk or costs, or to generate additional capital or income.
We actively exclude companies with exposure to the production of tobacco or tobacco-related manufacturing. We also avoid investment in companies with significant revenues from alcohol manufacture, armaments, gambling, adult entertainment, or anti-life products.
How to Invest
For more information on how you can invest in this fund, please read about the investment process.
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Latest Views
Promotion of Environmental or Social characteristics
This fund promotes environmental and/or social characteristics and is therefore classified as an “Article 8” product under the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation.
A description of the environmental or social characteristics
The consideration of environmental and social characteristics is an integral part of the investment management process and decisions to purchase or sell investments will be influenced by consideration of sustainability risks.
The Investment Manager believes that social and environmental impacts can represent material risks to investment values and a narrow focus on financial factors is unsustainable. To be sustainable, entities in which the fund invests should transition their operations not to cause significant environmental damage. Equally, investee entities should consider the social harms that can be caused by their operations and transition to a sustainable business model. The Investment Manager will actively engage with entities on areas of concern where it believes it can catalyse remedial action. In the case of equities, votes are exercised taking sustainability impacts into account. The Investment Manager may join collective actions on sustainability issues or pledge certain actions to promote sustainable outcomes on behalf of the Fund.
Information on the methodologies used to assess, measure and monitor the environmental or social characteristics
The Investment Manager has developed and operates detailed methodologies to assess, measure and monitor the environmental and social factors for investments within each asset class. For each asset class there is a common set of considerations.
For each investment, environmental assessments may include: climate change; use of materials, waste and failure to recycle (Circular Economy); land and biodiversity damage; water and ocean pollution and mismanagement; air pollution and particulates.
For each investment, social assessments may include: supply chain including working conditions, forced labour and discrimination; employee contracts and treatment; customer harms (including, for example, harms such as cancer from tobacco smoking or addiction to gambling); bribery and corruption; unfair social contribution and broader societal impacts such as tax behaviour.
For each of the environmental and social factors the Investment Manager may use various different sustainability indicators and screening criteria. Quantitative data is not always available but, where possible, the Investment Manager prefers to use information issued by the investee company or entity, alongside data from third party providers. In many cases, a qualitative assessment is required and the Investment Manager applies its own judgements, rather than relying on external ‘sustainability scores’. Given the wide range of inputs, it is not possible to list all of the sources for each characteristic here but details can be supplied on request to the Manager.