In managing our business and setting our strategic objectives, we select partner organisations and adhere to business principles that match the sustainable objectives we have set for ourselves.

As such Pictet is a signatory in several international projects that aim at unifying standards for sustainability in many areas. 

List of our commitments

Our results in the sustainable investment domain earned an award for our sustainable/ethical investment at the 2011 Pension & Investment Provider Awards (PIPA).

We were also named SRI Provider of the Year at the prestigious Global Pensions Awards for an unprecedented three consecutive years (2007, 2008 and 2009).

Moreover, Pictet-European Sustainable Equities fund has been awarded the Novethic SRI Label and has been distinguished with the ESG Indicators Award in 2010.

The objective of our sustainable investment process is to meet our clients’ extra-financial and financial expectations. Extra-financial sustainability is reached by restricting the investment universe to the best companies according to environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. Financial sustainability originates from a proprietary quantitative model the underlying factors of which have a clear link to sustainability while generating historically positive outperformance.

Our exclusive sustainability approach offers our clients a truly sustainable investment strategy with higher risk adjusted return in both the extra-financial and financial dimensions.

ESG impact measurementWe analyse and measure the extra-financial sustainability of our portfolios with two complementary methodologies: a standard analysis based on more than 150 ESG criteria, and a proprietary analysis focused on the major environmental and social externalities of each industry. Only companies with an above-average level of sustainability according to both methodologies are included in the portfolio. Our SRI investment strategy deliver substantially higher levels of sustainability than the index, as can be seen, for instance, in our quarterly report for the European Sustainable Equities fund. 

Exclusion and negative screeningOur retail SRI funds apply a set of standard exclusion criteria (armament, tobacco, nuclear energy, gaming, pornography and GMOs in agriculture). Within the scope of our segregated mandates negative filters can be tailored to meet clients’ specific ethical values. Such negative screens are designed to protect the investor from unwelcome reputation or ethical risk that might arise from the underlying investment strategy.

Pictet does not usually collect extra-financial data itself, but has outsourced data collection to leading SRI data providers in this area. We do, however, conduct fundamental research on sustainable investment topics and publish our insights on a regular basis. In the last two years, we published two major papers:

• The SRI Performance Paradox (2008), which shows how SRI or sustainable investing is a constant effort to strike a balance between short-term cost and long-term returns to the investor, society and the environment. 
• Can SRI prevent the next financial crisis? (2011), demonstrates that extra-financial research alone does not ensure better financial performance prospects and that it has to be combined with specific financial sustainability criteria.