Responsible Investment team awarded “ESG Manager of the year”

Funds Europe, a leading business strategy magazine for the European cross-border fund management industry, has announced the winners for Funds Europe Awards 2022. Nordea Asset Management’s Responsible Investment team has been recognised as “ESG Manager of the year”. It is the first time we receive the award for our ESG experience and strong focus on engagement. 

“We are happy that our long and hard work is recognized in the Responsible Investment Community, where we are already known as an stable actor, but now also get this recognition”, says Eric Pedersen, Head of Responsible Investments. 

NAM’s commitment to be a responsible manager began over 30 years ago when we launched our first sector screened fund. Over the years, we have developed our approach and policies to ensure that our holdings meet our expectations of ESG performance, and that sustainability risks are managed in our investment processes. These include our corporate-level Responsible Investments (RI) overlays, a baseline integration of ESG safeguards, which apply to all our funds. 

Funds Europe describes the background and motivation for the recognition like this:
"To win this award, a firm must convince the judges that it has set itself robust ESG targets and can demonstrate transparency in terms of how these are being met. This may be across one or all of the three ESG components. In winning this award, Nordea AM prepared a great presentation that demonstrated a lot of experience in the field of ESG, and a strong focus on engagement. This firm has been doing ESG for many years and it is fantastic to be able to acknowledge them. In addition, the transparency of Nordea's ESG approach and its commitment to education and awareness campaigns both played well with the judges."

Some of the high level key messages that was presented by the RI-team when applying for the award:

• We strive to be transparent on how we incorporate ESG in our investment decisions and activities. In addition to traditional financial reporting, we offer ESG reporting for several strategies, both monthly and quarterly. Our voting activities are publicly accessible on our Voting Portal and we report on our Responsible Investment activities in the RI Annual Report.
• We are also active supporters of and contributors to 39 Nordic, European and global RI initiatives, such as the PRI (early signatory in 2007) and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative (founding member in 2020).
• Finally, we believe education, awareness and knowledge are the most valuable assets to foster sustainability. For this, we've created our ESG Learning Center.

Other prizes won this year: Investment Week has chosen our STARS funds as the best ESG fund range, and the German consultant Scope has named us best broad supplier of ESG products.

“We are one of the few who can cover the whole investment universe with a full range of ESG products and that we are being recognised for”, Eric ends.