Overview

Responsible investment is an increasingly important topic for alternative investment managers. This umbrella term, which covers everything from screening securities from an investment portfolio to actively engaging with portfolio companies, is becoming more popular both with managers and their investors. For many, the use of responsible investment is seen as a way of mitigating investment risk; for some it is seen as a way of expressing one’s ethical beliefs while generating returns.

AIMA sees responsible investment as a series of possible actions, sitting on a spectrum of intenseness and impact:

  • Socially responsible investment: the act of screening certain securities or asset classes from a portfolio.
  • Environmental, social, governance (ESG) factors: identifying traits of a security that may not have been taken into account by that security’s price, but which may affect its desirability.
  • Engagement: seeking to influence the behaviour of a company in which a fund is invested in order to improve their environmental, social, and governance practices.
  • Impact investing: investments made in order to deliberately create social goods.

We seek to support the alternative investment management industry as it comes to terms with responsible investment. To that end, we work with our Responsible Investment Working Group of industry members to develop sound practice and other guides, and to communicate to our members what investors care most about in this field.

We also work to inform the regulatory debate around responsible investment. As regulators around the world take more of an interest in sustainability it is crucial that they avoid stifling innovation or creating artificial markets. As such AIMA has released a series of policy principles, which can be found in our Responsible Investment Primer. We believe that responsible investment regulation should be:

  • Investor-led
  • Principles-based
  • Proportionate
  • Non-duplicative
  • Consistent
  • Practical
  • Broad-based

In order to get involved with AIMA work in this space, or to sign on to our distribution list for responsible investment news, please contact Max Budra at mbudra@aima.org


AIMA Guidance


AIMA Responses 


Resources