Fund EcoMarket filter options – annual update

March 3rd, 2020

Once a year we gather ideas about what we could usefully add or alter on the Fund EcoMarket filter options – ahead of doing our annual research update for all funds.

As always there were dozens of options that we could have added, but in the interest of not letting the fund tool become too complicated we whittled this down to the list below.  (We have now started to gather information on these and once we have had a significant number of responses these will be brought in to the core ‘SRI/ESG’ filter fields – so that they generate results for our users).

Please be aware that if you use a paper copy of our filter options (downloadable from our Fact Find support area this will be updated shortly).

New Filters:

Policies, Issues and Themes filter area:

Environmental:

• • Arctic Drilling Exclusion
  • Unsustainable / illegal deforestation exclusion policy e.g. for palm oil
  • Avoids companies with fossil fuel reserves
  • Avoids genetically modified seeds/crop production

Social:

• • Demographic / ageing population theme

Governance:

• • Encourage TCFD alignment for banks & insurance companies
  • Only invest in TCFD aligned banks (and related financial companies)

Ethical:

• • Exclude all gilts/government bonds
  • Exclude some gilts / government bonds
  • Exclude animal testing except for medical purposes

Approaches, Application and features filter field:

Impact:

• • Described as an ‘impact investment fund’
  • Invests >25% of fund in environmental or social solutions companies
  • Invests >50% of fund in environmental or social solutions companies
  • Invests in green bonds
  • Invests in social bonds

Fund Features:

• • Passive / index led strategy
  • Data led strategy
  • ESG weighted / tilt

Corporate Activity filter box:

Other Company Features:

• • Sustainable real estate / property strategy (company wide, publicly available)
  • Diversity engagement strategy e.g. gender (company wide)

SRI Styles classification update

Those familiar with the site may also notice that we have made some minor changes to the wording on some of the SRI Styles to make ‘core’ features easier to recognise.  The following has been altered:

• ‘Ethically Balanced’ is now ‘Ethical – Balanced’
• ‘Negative Ethical’ is now ‘Ethical – Negative’

This follows on from a couple of minor additional tweaks that were made in response to market events:

• Added ‘Limited Exclusions’ as an SRI Style to make it clearer which funds only exclude a small fraction of their investable universe.  This was previously only filterable via the ‘Approaches, Applications and Features’ filter area (under the ‘Approaches’ column) .
• Added an ‘Other’ SRI Style option,  so that it would be clear that we had looked at a fund but did not believe the fund fitted withing an existing SRI Styles options.  (Funds that are now ‘Unclassified’ are those that we have not yet classified.)